This Is Not A Dating Service

Via CDR Salamander, we find out about this story in the Washington Post about the Naval Acadamy in Annapolis asking an unusual question. I’ll let the Post story speak for itself…

Chris Ledoux thought he might sponsor a midshipman at the United States Naval Academy. Opening one’s home as a safe haven to a plebe, or academy freshman, is an Annapolis tradition and a point of pride to many Annapolitans.

But Ledoux got no farther than page four on the application — and a pair of questions that required him to state whether he would prefer a plebe of a particular religion or race.

He called local politicians last week to complain about the questions, which struck him as inappropriate for a service academy to ask. Word spread to local civil rights leaders, who were incensed. A controversy was born.

“This is not a dating service,” said Ledoux, an Annapolis resident. “This is the federal government. And when the federal government is asking questions like, ‘What race do you prefer?’ they need to be careful.”

Now here’s the strange thing, and honestly, I don’t know why we put up with it. Government goes into Afghanistan by force. It engages in battle. It captures someone. It takes that someone to Gitmo, or to some secret location, and starts waterboarding him. Scandal, scandal, scandal. And presumption-of-innocence galore…nobody, anywhere, with even the slightest internal knowledge of this character, is going to assert this guy is innocent of anything or that there’s even the scintilla of possibility he might be innocent, and from the cable television channel to the water-cooler we’ll finger-waggle each other and tut-tut each other that he’s a “detainee” and it’s improper to call him a “terrorist.” But most of all there’s the secrecy. How DARE the government not divulge, nay, shout from the rooftops that they had this guy.

Everybody, in that scenario, wants an “open” government. A “transparent” government.

You ever ask a government bureaucrat, or follow the misadventures of a journalist as he proceeds to ask government bureaucrat, what is done with these forms that have race-checkboxes on them?

It’s freakin’ impossible to get a straight, consistent answer. I don’t care if you’re talking about job applications, or college admission forms, or any kind of program enrollee form. Typically, the only nugget of information you can mine from the exercise is “this is not a quota.” To simply ask, then, what exactly a quota is, is to re-submerge in the endless labyrinth of contradictory answers, homina-hominas, and no-comment and you’ll-have-to-ask-him-over-there.

Not that there are too many possibilities here. In all likelihood, USNA is probably conducting this the way Ledoux said, as a dating service. My question is, who exactly thought this was a good idea? Laws against the same kind of discrimination, with regard to the actual housing itself, are fairly bursting at the seams. It comes time to sponsor a midshipman, and suddenly segregation is all okay again?

Flesh! Oh, No! VII

To protect our lives and our property, government has an interest in enacting and enforcing laws. It also has an interest in promoting culture, as in, a certain culture. It should work to make sure some cultures die, and other cultures thrive.

Now, I’m sure, with regard to my Point #1, most people would agree, and with my Point #2, most people would ask if I’m out of my freakin’ gourd. What’re you talkin’ about, Freeberg? Government has no business promoting religion over secularism, or stripes over plaid, or…whatever. Hey, you know now that I give it a little extra thought, that’s right. Personal preferences about the weird things people do, so long as those things don’t break the law — are irrrelevant to the job. This is deeply ingrained in Americana. Any time you fire up the DVD player and watch a movie about the law, whether it’s “Dragnet” or “CSI” or “Monk” or the latest feature film just out of theaters, the story isn’t complete if someone doesn’t look Johnny Law square in the eye and repeat that classic line: “Are you going to arrest me, Detective? Because if not, you have no business (being here) (keeping me here).” And as we all know, that is the way government is supposed to work. It’s against the law, or it isn’t. If it isn’t, buzz off. We don’t care if you find it worthy of comment, Mr. policeman/government official. And we really don’t care if you personally dislike something. The guy wearing a dress…the woman piercing her eyebrows twenty-two times…the Wiccan bowling club.

Government is culture-neutral. You work in government, you’d better get ready to serve people, in all their makes, types, shapes and sizes. And that means leaving them alone, so long as they abide by the law. Promote no culture, punish no culture.

We all know that to be true. It’s the American way.

So you know what, all you culture-neutral types? You’re right. I was wrong. I humbly apologize. I just don’t know what got into me.

(Morgan clears his throat.)

L.A. shoots down �Hooters for Neuters�
Bikini contest fund-raiser for pet spaying, neutering program raises hackles
Updated: 2:07 p.m. PT June 28, 2006

LOS ANGELES – The city of Los Angeles’ Animal Services Department will not accept money from a planned bikini contest fund-raiser called “Hooters for Neuters.”

Animal Services Director Ed Boks reconsidered Tuesday after city officials said the event was degrading to women. He said the department will bow out of the July 13 fund-raiser at a Hollywood nightclub hosted by the Hooters restaurant chain. The money was slated for the department’s spay and neuter programs.

“It certainly was not my intention to offend anyone,” Boks said in a statement. It wasn’t immediately known whether the event will still be held.

Although the fund-raiser was not sponsored by the city, a promotional flier was posted on the Animal Services Department Web site. The original flier showed a bikini-clad woman, but the latest version shows a dog wearing a T-shirt that says “Hooters for Neuters.”

City officials earlier had sharply criticized the decision to participate in the event.

“Are we going backward here?” City Controller Laura Chick said. “We are a city with all kinds of progressive programs that empower women and end discrimination in the workplace, and now we’re being connected with a Hooters bikini contest. It isn’t right.”

Councilwoman Jan Perry said the department’s attempt to be creative in telling pet owners to sterilize their animals “crosses the line.”

“I was surprised and amazed with the photograph on the flier, and I don’t think it projects a good image for the city of Los Angeles,” Perry said.

Boks said that the owners of Hooters approached him about the fund-raiser a month ago. He said the ads were made without consulting the department.

“When somebody steps up and says they want to help your agency raise money, your inclination is to say ‘Yes,'” Boks said. “But, we probably won’t be involved in any future bikini contests.”

I love this line about ads being made without consulting the department. That’s just great…someone was thrown under the bus, and whoever did the write-up was kind enough to the scapegoat to let him languish in anonymity. Some poor schmuck answered the phone, someone who probably reports directly to this limp-wristed spineless Ed Bok character, thought he was doing a great thing for the department accepting the help of a mature and solvent business interest like the Hooter’s restaurant chain. Next thing he knows, he’s being measured shoulders-to-toes for the guillotine because Jan Perry and Laura Chick threw a hissy fit.

Is it against the law, or isn’t it?

I demand equal time. I demand that, the next time a business or a foundation asks to help the Animal Services Department, and it’s got something to do with frumpy women who promote the extreme brand of man-bashing feminism, and intimidating good-looking women from wearing shorts and bikinis, that their offer of help be soundly rejected. The very next time that situation comes up. Oops! My mistake! The situation doesn’t come up at all! Man-bashing, bikini-hating feminists just aren’t that nice.

Poster at right taken from a similar program in Salt Lake City, UT (click to enlarge). I wonder why the officials in City Hall there didn’t say something. Uh…perhaps they had more important things to think about, like their JOBS?

Thing I Know #55. Anyone objecting to the presence of a young lady in a skimpy outfit, or her attire, is someone I don’t want to know. I can think of several reasons for this objection and none of them are the least bit healthy, helpful or benevolent.

Chariots Of The Bush-Bashers

Thing I Know #1. Very few people who have four-wheel drive have any reason to expect they’ll need it. Ever.
Thing I Know #28. People who drive great big cars don’t mind following other great big cars, but they absolutely have to get out from behind a little itty-bitty car even if it involves passing over a double-yellow line.
Thing I Know #72. I don’t understand what’s going on with driving cars. So many people like to “brag” about their ineptitude with computers, but nobody ever confesses to their own poor driving skills.

I was just noticing there are an awful lot of letters to editors of this-newspaper or that-newspaper about George Bush and his wretched oil buddies skimming off the top and gouging customers, and some of these letters are even sophisticated enough to make some commentary about supply-and-demand. This shows that as of the tenth grade in high school, they were still paying attention. It also shows they understand when we all gulp away at the gas pump, burning more gas than we need to, without resolving the supply issues, we just make it worse.

But nobody ever seems to be bragging about how many miles-a-gallon they get. Nobody’s bragging about having a four-banger, or a three-banger. Like they did last time we had a gas crisis, thirty years ago.

I thought this was odd. But I have a rule around here: When you leave things undefined, you leave room for someone else (me) to fill in the details.

So I thought it would be a fun exercise to pair these folks up with what I thought they might be driving. Why not? I can’t prove it’s them, but I can’t prove it isn’t them. Let’s go.

Charles writes to the Kansas City Star: “Pursuant to a recent comment comparing the price of gas to buying soda pop: What is the writer thinking? There is absolutely no comparison.

“When I purchase $6 worth of pop, it will last me approximately two months. However, when I purchase $6 worth of gas at the same price, it will last me about two hours. On the other hand, comparing gourmet coffee to the price of gas is very similar. Depending on whether or not you are a coffee freak, you could still purchase enough gourmet coffee to last up to a year when comparing that to the price of gasoline.

“My credit card bill for the purchase of gasoline runs approximately $400 per month. I cannot even imagine spending that amount of money on pop or gourmet coffee!

“There is no mention of the millions of people who have to drive back and forth to work, much less us elderly people who have to have gasoline to go back and forth to doctors, hospitals, etc.”

Gary writes into the Kitsap Sun: “While oil companies are bringing in record profits, as a way to help us with high gas prices, the Republicans in Congress want to give everyone $100 and open ANWR for drilling. Why is the GOP�s answer to everything tax cuts and trashing the environment? Why don�t they actually deal with the problem instead of shifting the burden to future generations?

“One of the government�s primary functions is to maintain fair competition in the marketplace. After years of conglomeration, there are only five oil companies left controlling the market, and there is little to no competition. It�s time for the government to do its job and break up these oil companies in order to maintain healthy competition in the marketplace, which will result in lower prices. It�s been done before; In 1911, under the populist Republican President Theodore Roosevelt, the U.S. government broke up the Standard Oil company, which at the time controlled 64 percent of the market, into 34 smaller companies.

“But will this happen? Not while the oil companies are stuffing the pockets of politicians, and not as long as we have an oil man in the White house. And people wonder why gas prices are so high …”

Phillip’s wife poses proudly, at left, with their new Explorer. He writes to the Times-Herald Record Online: “In the June 14 edition of the Times Herald Record, there is an article on why gas prices are higher in Orange County than Ulster and Sullivan. In the article, Robert Sinclair Jr. of AAA New York says, ‘Stations in busier areas, on highways or at major intersections, tend to have higher prices. Where demand goes up, the price goes up.’

“Isn’t that admitting that the oil companies are charging the gas stations a higher price just because a lot of people shop there? So he is saying that if there is more money to be made, they will jack up the price? Is this not the definition of price-gouging? Does Sinclair believe the general public is so unintelligent that we will accept this?

“It also states that corn is used to make ethanol and the government requires its use in Orange County because of high amounts of emissions. They say bigger population makes for more pollution, so we need ethanol, but not in smaller populations. All emissions are pollution. It boils down to they will do and say whatever they need to, so they can justify their greed.

“If all this was true about the prices going up, then how did ExxonMobil have a surplus of billions and give a severance package of millions to their retiring CEO? Everyone needs to let it be known we aren’t going to drive all over looking for lower prices and we will not tolerate this insult to our intelligence. How much is enough? We need to stand up and do something instead of “grin and bear it” as Sinclair says we should.”

Derek, who recently became the next owner of the 1985 Chevy Suburban you see to the right, writes into the Daily Press of Ashland WI with a great question that I’m sure nobody’s thought of before: “What about the oil reserves?

“Has anyone noticed that George Bush and his clan of right-wing conservatives have been obsessed for years with drilling for oil in Alaska? Well, their proposal has many flaws.

“First off, drilling in Alaska wouldn’t give any immediate relief to the already high gas prices. It would take 10 to 15 years before we would see any benefits from it. By then God knows what the price of gas will be. We need a drop in the prices now, not a decade from now. I don’t think Bush knows what it’s like to pay $3 a gallon for gas. If he did, he wouldn’t come up with these plans that wouldn’t help anybody in the near future.

“Secondly, over 1 million acres of wildlife refuge could be destroyed. What would happen to the poor animals and the environment they live in? They would lose their habitat and probably lose the will to survive. Not to mention that there are species of animals, such as polar bears and seals, that couldn’t live anywhere else. Does Bush care about all that? No, I’m guessing he’s drooling at the thought that he found another way to line the oil man’s pocket.

“Third and lastly, there are other options! They can put pressure on OPEC to lower the price or they can flood the market with reserves. He probably doesn’t want to upset his oil buddies, who back Republicans in elections, by producing a plan to lower the prices. Life, as the Alaskan animals know it, is at stake.”

Donald makes a brilliant point to the News-Record of Greensboro, NC. His souped-up monster truck is shown at left. “The following was taken from Market Watch Newsletter: “Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) reported a 32 percent increase in net income to $7.64 billion, compared with $5.79 billion a year ago.” That’s $7.64 billion profit for three months.

“Why does the government allow oil companies to continue to rob us at the gas pump? Could it be that Bush wants to keep all his oil company buddies happy? Just joking.

“All companies are entitled to make a profit, but this is outrageous with gas at over $2.25 per gallon. No company should be able to make that much profit on a product that we all need. Maybe that’s the point � we all need it, so they can charge what they want to. Maybe we could get New York’s attorney general to look into this one.”

Herbert, who just realized his life-long dream of purchasing two Hummers so he could park them side by side (right), pointed out to the Kansas City Star that there’s no way anyone can make a profit in the billions without gouging customers. “I read with interest the article concerning the interviews (11/10, Business) with the heads of the different oil companies. But now that they say they didn�t gouge the public, everything has suddenly gotten quiet on the subject. How stupid do they think the public is?

“In my view, there is no way a company can declare an $8 billion profit and not have gouged the customers. After all, profit means monies retained after all expenses have been deducted from gross income. And the congressmen conducting the interview just accepted their answers. There must be some truth in the notion that we have the best politicians money can buy. If we are so short on fuel and in danger of running out, why do we export so much oil?”

Bruce, just in from bringing home the brand-new diesel fun-buggy you see at left, writes in to the Berkeley Daily Planet to let them know the oil companies are ripping us off: “The oil companies are ripping us off, big time. Each quarter, their profits are record profits; meaning that each quarter, their profits are more than ever before. They blame high gas prices on the price of crude oil, but their obscenely high profits show this to be a lie. It is simple greed.

“We need energy independence. That means more investment in solar, wind, and other renewable sources of energy. I don�t trust the oil companies to make those investments, and neither should you.

“We need a retroactive Obscene Profits Tax on the oil companies to redirect funds toward energy independence. It is time for Congress to show some political courage.”

Now, I don’t have any logical reason to believe the educated guesses I’ve made about the chariots of these windbags, are correct guesses. For all I know, they’re driving renovated three-cylinder K-cars from the eighties, or hybrids, or solar-powered converted lawnmowers.

Why aren’t they saying so? I’m forty years old this weekend. That means I can remember the last time we went through this. And that’s what people were doing. People bellyached about gas prices, obscene oil company profits, blah blah blah, and you either thought Jimmy Carter was screwing everything up or he was “handed a raw deal by the Ay-Rabs,” or both. But before you commenced with the complaining, there was this culturally-required preamble. “My family and I are doing all we can, we just traded in the (blank) on a (blank).” And maybe there was something about “We have to have the truck because my husband needs it for his work.” Except if that applied, the truck was mostly aluminum, it never had more than four cylinders, and a good strong man could push down on the hood and get it rocking good enough to tip over.

Last time we had a gas crisis, that’s what a “truck” was. Now look at the freeway. Just look at it. What you see roaming the asphalt, doesn’t look too different from the pictures I’ve included above, right?

A tiny car, as I was just getting old enough for the learner’s permit, was a status symbol. This newer situation is all bollywonkers. People are complaining about gas prices and “obscene profits,” and everything I’m seeing out there on the roads, is big enough to squish me without even knowing I’m there.

I get 37 miles a gallon. What are these whiners getting?

Just For Fun

Via Boortz: What can you do more quickly, watch this flash cartoon beginning-to-end, or figure out what’s going on? Drop me a line if you can crack that nut.

Gerard Van der Leun, who is not being paid proper respect if I simply say “he is a good writer” since he can write well enough to raise the dead without half-trying, has another gig. He’s the editor of Pajamas Media. He gave us a generous spike of traffic at the beginning of this month, for which I did give credit, but I was going to work up a pictogram of the results like I did a month previous when the Rottweiler did the same thing. Someone’s deserving of this, since Pajamas b-a-r-e-l-y surpassed the Rottweiler spike. In so doing, the Pajamas referral set a new traffic record for this, The Blog That Nobody Reads.

Unfortunately, an application crash sent the first draft of the pictogram to oblivion, and with the hectic events of the holiday I didn’t quite get around to making a second draft until just now. Cool beans. Bad news is, the scrolling nature of the Pajamas Media home page means that the mention of the Blog Nobody Reads has scrolled into their archives, therefore, most of the hits have scrolled as well. Good news is, as you would hope, a good chunk of that traffic has decided to hang around. You can see throughout June, a hundred-visit day was a rarity, and a month later, it’s fairly commonplace for us. More of a rarity when we fall short of that.

Although we don’t pay much attention to who’s watching, we are nevertheless grateful. I also learned something. The Blog Nobody Reads has an informal policy that George Carlin’s Seven Words You Can’t Say, may from time to time pop up in the text of a post, but headlines are supposed to be kept pristine of such vulgarities, restricted to the milder territory ending at “bitch,” “damn,” “fart,” etc. (The “Look At Me, I Can’t Park For Shit” series is exempt from this rule because…well, the way these assholes park, nothing else really does an adequate job of describing it.)

Now, I took it as a given that the four-letter-plural describing a female’s mammary glands, which rhymes with the word “grits,” was not among the Carlin list. This is one of those things where you’re shocked to find out you’re wrong, even though the person who reveals that you’re wrong (my long-suffering significant other), is shocked you’re wrong. Someone could have won a hundred dollars from me on a bet about that, quite easily. Anyway, to the best of my knowledge nobody got in trouble. Hope nobody did.

Supply Side

President Bush says the budget deficit is now projected to be $100 billion less than originally thought, and his tax cuts get the credit.

President Bush touted new deficit figures Tuesday showing considerable improvement upon earlier administration predictions, saying it shows the wisdom of his tax cuts.

Bush himself announced the figures — a task that for the most part has been left to lower-ranking administration officials in the past. The new figures show the deficit for the budget year ending September 30 will be $296 billion — much better than the $423 billion that Bush predicted in February and a slight improvement over 2005.

Okay look carefully on the debate we’re having. Watch how it’s being slowly transformed. It’s not at all unremarkable to find mention of the “Discredited Laffer Curve” — we’re supposed to be in a state of debate about whether there is anything to the notion of Taxable Income Elasticity. Even more ridiculous than that, is if we’re not in a state of debate about such a thing, we’re supposed to have decided against the notion. Taxable Income is rigid. You raise a billion dollars with a one percent tax rate, you raise it to two percent, you’ll have two billion dollars, take it to the bank. Sure, nobody comes out and says that outright…but you haven’t got long to wait before someone says “such-and-such a program is underfunded, we need to raise taxes.”

But weirdly, the almost-but-not-quite official information repository Wikipedia contains nothing about outstanding controversy in the Taxable Income Elasticity entry. The closest it comes, is this…

Critiques of the Laffer Curve

Conventional economic paradigms acknowledge the basic notion of the Laffer curve, but they argue that government was operating on the left-hand side of the curve, so a tax cut would thus lower revenue. The central question is the elasticity of work with respect to tax rates. For example, Pecorino (1995) argued that the peak occurred at tax rates around 65%, and summarized the controversy as:

Just about everyone can agree that if an increase in tax rates leads to a decrease in tax revenues, then taxes are too high. It is also generally agreed that at some level of taxation, revenues will turn down. Determining the level of taxation where revenues are maximized is more controversial.

That’s all you get. There’s no mention of a “Long discredited Laffer Curve,” even though, as demonstrated above, you can find mention after mention of that silly phrase simply by entering it into a search engine…mentionings by people who think they know what they’re talking about.

There ain’t nothing to it, folks. It’s just a game of Telephone. The Laffer Curve holds true, holds strong, and is proven fact.

And we’re on the “right” side of it. President Bush got tax cuts through Congress, and in so doing raised revenues. It’s just a fact.

Now, back to the subject of how the debate is morphing. We can’t have a debate, anymore, about whether cutting taxes raise revenues, or whether it is possible for such a thing to happen. We can’t have that debate anymore…because if we did, it would be too short. So watch what the lefties do with this. We’re going to have a debate, going forward, about whether $296 billion is a big number. Nevermind that that’s a relative thing…nevermind that, if you’re going to make it relevant to the discussion, you have to compare it to $423 billion and ultimately answer “er…well, nope.” No, we’re about to have a debate on whether $296 billion is big.

Just watch.

But meanwhile, keep your eye on the ball. The primary debate, the don’t-move-the-goalposts debate, is on whether tax cuts work. And they do. In order to say otherwise, and pose something that will remain durable throughout multiple scenarios, you have to assert that when private citizens are allowed to keep more of their money, they do something with that money that’s unproductive or counterproductive compared to what the government would do with that same money. Like, throw it down a garbage disposal, or set it on fire or something.

That’s nuts. We form companies and hire people, that’s what we do with our money. If we lack the material station in life to do this, we put the money in IRAs or 401(k)s, and in so doing, turn the money over to other people who are going to do exactly that.

Tax cuts work. They simply do. By even debating whether it is so or not, or putting up with others who want to challenge it by rhetoric-over-reason, we debase ourselves.

How To Get Traffic

One of the recurring themes here at The Blog Nobody Reads — indeed, one of the reasons we call ourselves that — is that when you say something in public, you have the option of trying to get people to pay attention to you or you have the option of saying something worthwhile, helpful, and accurate. You may do both, and you may try to do both…but only awkwardly. You can’t really give both of those objectives your all. You can’t serve two masters.

Here is a sterling silver example of what I’m talking about. Remember our friend Deb Frisch? She engaged in what was only called a “debate,” and never really was one, essentially, just posting a lot of hatred and invective and crap on the site of Protein Wisdom. Frisch was…well, what happened to her is what The Blog Nobody Reads calls getting STWF’d, which means, something compels you to quit your job and go Spend Time With the Family. The public is to be led to believe this is a sudden itch between your ears — in this case, Frisch’s altruistic desires to protect her bosses from the quickly escalating scandal — but according to the reality upon which a reasonable person would be willing to gamble important things like money and body parts…no. It wasn’t an itch between the subject’s ears. She was fired. For all practical purposes, she was let go. No knowledgeable and thinking man will throw his ‘nards on a block and assert anything different.

Now, in addition to getting STWF’d, we have a new verb. Getting “Frisch’d”. Which means to get STWF’d because of your own damnably poor judgment in posting borderline-illegal comments on the “innernets”…in your own name.

That’s the Frisch saga. That’s the main body of the story, and it’s pretty much done. Ah, but the noodly appendages of the story are still sprouting out, and will be for the foreseeable future. How interesting those noodly appendages are.

This brings us back to the subject at hand; the latest noodly appendage of delicious anecdote, just goes to show why we here at The Blog Nobody Reads, aren’t in it for the attention, and seldom make mention of things like traffic. (We do, on occasion, out of gratitude to the generous blogger-brethren who bring it to us.)

Well…get this. Six-Meat Buffet has a screen scrape of Deb Frisch’s Sitemeter reading. This is one of the tools that bloggers like me, can use to track readers like you. When I make reference to the notion that most of the traffic here is a bunch of Google searches for Erica Chevillar’s bikini pictures, this is how I know that to be true. Creepy, huh?

Anyway, this is the kind of “spike” you see, I guess, when you threaten to molest a two-year-old, and make references to the toddler being murdered. I mean, you know, once you lose your job over it and the “blogosphere” starts talking about it. Kinda interesting.

Take a look at that. Zoom!

Does the attention mean something, personally, to Dr. Frisch? Read her comments and judge for yourself. Is The Blog Nobody Reads terrified that it will start threatening babies if it starts to pay more attention to who’s paying attention? No, not really. Come to think of it, you can’t really say The Blog Nobody Reads is above the whole attention-whoring schtick, because frankly, we’re not. But it just goes to show. Just because people are watching you, doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve got something worth saying.

It’s hard to keep your eyes off a wreck; it’s even harder to keep your eyes off a wreck happening in slow motion.

Ann Ann Coulter Coulter Vindicated Vindicated

Poor Rude Pundit. The enthusiastic left-wing blogger, about whom I had written over the Memorial Day weekend, just doesn’t know what to think. On Saturday, he wanted to know “is it enough to get Coulter’s book recalled and her column cancelled?” And “It” would be the allegations involving Coulter’s plagiarism in her new book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism. This exuberant comment trailed his weekend item All Coulter Plagiarism Allegations in One Post (Bumped Up For Your Weekend Reading Pleasure). Well, I did have some pleasure with this over the weekend. I’ll just lift one of these items at random and make a comment about it; note that the comment will be applicable, whether you find it meritorious or not, pretty much through the entire list. Let’s see, this one happens to be from one of Ann Coulter’s columns, and the Rude Pundit documents it here (warning, link name has naughty language in it, clicking could be NSFW).

Ann Coulter Quote: “A photo of a woman breastfeeding an infant, titled ‘Jesus Sucks.'”

From The Flummery Digest: “One otherwise tame photograph of a woman breastfeeding an infant was titled ‘Jesus Sucks.'”

Mmkay. Tricky thing about this, is that two items of documentation are using simple language to describe a common fact. The fact is a singular, tangible noun. It is a singular instance. It is an object. To avoid this kind of “plagiarism,” you would have to grab the original piece you’re trying not to plagiarize, in one hand, Roget’s Thesaurus in another, and skim for synonyms. Both works use the word “infant.” Infant has synonyms. Coulter, in not citing the Flummery Digest, should have used a word like “baby.” Or she could have used the word “suckling”…although “suckling” is what the baby is doing, not what the mother is doing. Furthermore, most editors would change “suckling” right back into “breastfeeding” because the word “sucks” is in the same sentence, a few words down. That’s a no-no. She could have used “captioned” instead of “titled.” As for “Jesus Sucks,” well, that’s a quote.

The idea that the Flummery Digest is the original inspiration for Ann’s writing, likely as it may be, technically, is conjecture and nothing more. Some would reasonably assert that it isn’t even a likelihood, the three-fer described above notwithstanding. After all, how many different ways are there to describe such a thing.

By Friday, Ann Coulter got two unlikely allies: Kos himself, and Josh Marshall.

TPM Muckracker has an itemized list of Ann Coulter’s supposed plagiarism, and sorry to say, there’s not much there.

Coulter is a lot of things, but it doesn’t look like plagiarism is one of them.

Update: Josh Marshall:

To me personally, some of the examples/accusations seem strained — simply similar statements of the same basic facts. And sometimes there are only so many ways to describe one set of facts. In other cases the similarities of the wording strike me as hard to see as a coincidence. Especially when there seem to be multiple instances of similarities in the same column coming from the same source.

What these examples show is that Coulter is a lazy writer who rips off other people’s research, but stealing someone else’s arguments isn’t “plagiarism”. It’s just being a lazy, unimaginative writer.

At that time, Crown Publishing Group, publisher of Godless, had already dismissed the charges; Monday, United Press Syndicate, which carries Coulter’s column, followed suit. And this is what has Rude Pundit in a tizzy. To say nothing of an impressive state of cognitive dissonance. Remember, Rude Pundit? You had her over a barrel, and her book was going to be recalled? As you can see by his title, that was then and this is now…

Did You Honestly Expect Any Other Outcome?(Updated):
Universal Press Syndicate, which allows Ann Coulter to inflict herself on about 100 newspapers a week, has rejected charges of plagiarism against Coulter. Said Lee Salem, Universal Press president, “There are only so many ways you can rewrite a fact and minimal matching text is not plagiarism.” Also, he said, “Universal Press Syndicate is confident in the ability of Ms. Coulter, an attorney and frequent media target, to know when to make attribution and when not to.” ‘Cause attorneys would never make a “mistake” like plagiarism, now, would they.

Yeah, the system was stacked against you from the get-go. That’s why you were so sure this putt would sink, even when cooler heads like freakin’ Kos were out there, saying it just isn’t so.

Now, you see the pattern here in the way a liberal mind works? Coulter, assuming she did indeed draw upon the sources that were supposed to have been “plagiarized” — and that’s a leap of faith — might have cited those sources. Or, she might have elected not to. United Press Syndicate says, in sum, deciding not to is a reasonable decision. So these are both reasonable decisions.

You may do A.

You may do !A.

A liberal comes along, decides if he wuz you, he’d do A.

You elected to do !A.

Scandal.

It’s enough to inspire a third installment of “What Is A Liberal?” (Installment I, Installment II). Good Lieutentant is hoping I work up such a thing. If and when I do, whether this is the subject or not, better-than-even-odds Rude Pundit will be the focus of that third installment.

Let us sum this thing up: Rude Pundit had an opinion on whether there was shenanigans going on here or not. Kos had a different opinion. Kos was the more reasonable of the two. One for the history books, folks, and it says something unflattering about the Pundit.

Sensenbrenner Watch

James Bostwick, site admin at Newsblog Central, caught me off-guard although he didn’t really mean to do it. He was looking for a bio for the new Staff Page there. I saw his own bio had this nice structure to it, so I just read it in and customized the entries to my own answers. Like we used to say in software development…just what the customer asked for, not what he wanted. Well anyway, the product got shipped, so to speak.

So that first question, made me think. Favorite politician. Yeah, that’s tough; easy to figure out who you don’t like. Who did I like. Well, I’ve always liked Sensenbrenner and Weldon, but of course they aren’t mine, so I had to do some research before I actually entered them. At least I had to with the man from Wisconsin.

So I went looking, and came across this really cool gripe page. As soon as I found the lame complaints against Sensenbrenner, I knew he was my man. Like for example, get a load of this one.

Real ID Act Will Cause Really Big Problems

Jim Sensenbrenner’s “Real ID Bill” has now become law, and most Americans will be aghast when they find out what changes it will bring. Do you look forward to your periodic visit to the Division of Motor Vehicles to renew your driver’s license? Well, break out the champagne, because that ritual is going to become longer and more involved.

Rep. Sensenbrenner wants you to provide proof of your identity and legal residence in the United States when you get or renew your license. But there are problems, as explained here:

States fear the new rules may force applicants to make more than one trip to motor vehicle departments, once to provide documents such as birth certificates that states must verify and a second time to pick up the license, state officials said.

But you won’t be the only one enjoying the new system. Under this law,

by May 2008 every state will be required to contact the issuers of birth certificates, mortgage statements, utility bills, Social Security cards, and immigration papers before granting a driver’s license. States will also have to keep copies of those documents for seven years.

And who will pay for all this? It gets even better:

Cheye Calvo, of the National Conference of State Legislatures, said the bill imposes big costs and sets an unrealistic three-year deadline for states without giving them a voice in the process. Congress estimated it will cost about $100 million to purchase the necessary equipment to meet the Real ID Act’s demands, but Calvo said the real figure is likely to be $500 million to $700 million.

“We don’t have a whole lot of confidence that the money is going to materialize in the federal budget to pay for all these tedious new mandates,” Calvo said.

Sensenbrenner thinks his new law involves just standing in line for a few more minutes, and that will prevent thousands of people from being killed by an airplane attack. Wrong on two counts!

He, like many politicians, is totally out of touch with the life of regular people. (I think the DMV staff does a fine job of processing customers relative to the meager amount of resources they have, but my last renewal took almost two hours. What are the chances that F. James sits around that long?) And terrorists may well be in this country legally or at least have good forged documents to present to the harassed folks at the DMV. This law will not help prevent terrorism as much as, say, protecting nuclear power plants.

Yeah, you got it. Illegal aliens are getting drivers’ licenses, so a new law is passed that you have to prove you belong here before you can proceed with the process, and here comes the crying. Wah, expensive, wah, extra paperwork, unnecessary, it will never work, wait in line, wah wah wah.

I knew there was something about him I liked.

For those who can’t quite catch on…this is kind of like saying “The United States must stop doing xyz because people around the world don’t like us.” The rhetorical question that remains unanswerable, is, if we stop doing xyz, who dislikes us today who will start liking us when we stop doing it? It’s the same situation here. If the DMV just waves people right on through, not bothering to verify citizenship or proper immigration, are those lines going to just zip along like crap through a goose? Nobody’s going to put their testicles on a block and say so. No, it’s always the one-sided argument…”don’t do this or the lines will take too long.”

That’s like saying, don’t drive your car too much or the summer weather is going to be hot. No shit, Sherlock. How hot will the weather be if we don’t drive? Every bit as hot…and you don’t want people to think about that, do you.

Be that as it may. It always pays to watch the watchers…and you know, even from where I sit James F.’s record is far from perfect. So this is a lefty-blog worth taking a gander at now and then.

Memo For File XIV

While doing some cursory research for the previous post, I came across three things I thought were kind of cool.

A post from spring of 2005 describing how the left-wingers were about to come after the blogosphere in the name of “diversity”; including this classic line:

Ah, the diversity cult is coming after the most free (and I mean free-don’t cost ‘nut’n), open, and painfully full of feedback public areas ever created, The Blogosphere.

Good gracious, no one here cares what or who you are, but what you say. The whole diversity racket is so 1970s anyway. [emphasis mine]

This one has to go to the sidebar.

This other one is called Horsefeathers. Has some pretty original thinking going on, based on stuff you can’t pick up without a rich knowledge of history. Like this thing:

During World War II, Operation Bodyguard was the overall Allied strategic deception plan in Europe for 1944, carried out as part of the build-up to the invasion of Normandy. The major objective of this plan was to lead the Germans to believe that the invasion of northwestern Europe would come later than was actually planned, and to threaten attacks at other locations than the true objective, including the Pas de Calais, the Balkans, southern France, Norway, and Soviet attacks in Bulgaria and northern Norway.

The name ‘Bodyguard’ was derived from a comment by Winston Churchill to Stalin at the Tehran Conference in 1943, saying, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

Cool stuff. Obviously, worth reading. To the sidebar it goes.

Finally, I found this Slate article that was published right after President Bush’s re-election. Poor little blue girl living in a red state, whines about the smackdown she got the night before. This is stunning. Read…

Why Americans Hate Democrats � A Dialogue
The unteachable ignorance of the red states.
By Jane Smiley
Updated Thursday, Nov. 4, 2004, at 6:24 PM ET

…The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry. I suppose the good news is that 55 million Americans have evaded the ignorance-inducing machine. But 58 million have not. (Well, almost 58 million�my relatives are not ignorant, they are just greedy and full of classic Republican feelings of superiority.) [emphasis mine]

Amazing, isn’t it? We’re smart; those other guys are ignorant; they have classic feelings of superiority. They do. All in one breath.

Impressive. No wonder here it is, nearly two years later, and this column still neatly captures the reason the Democrats are about to get their asses kicked one more time. Twenty months they’ve had to explain why we made the wrong decision, and all they can say is “You’re stuuuuuupid…! (and smug too.)”

It reminds me of that classic bumper sticker…”those of you who think you know everything are exceedingly annoying to those of us who really do.”

Women Hardest Hit

The campaign to scare the dickens out of people over the next ice age global warming climate change has again starkly insulted my faculties for critical thinking. What else is new. Well, actually, there is something new. You heard this joke, didn’t you?

Disgusted by what he has seen on earth, God decides to destroy it and start over.

He orders one of His angels to appear at the offices of four of America’s leading
newspapers, the Wall Street Journal, the SF Chronicle, the Washington Post and
the New York Times, in order to give them the scoop that He intends to destroy
the world in 2 days time.

The next morning, the following headlines appear:

Wall Street Journal: GOD TO DESTROY THE WORLD TOMORROW!! MARKETS WILL CLOSE EARLY!

SF Chronicle: GOD TO END WORLD TOMORROW!! ANTI-RELIGIOUS PROTESTS PLANNED. ACLU TO SUE GOD!!

Washington Post: END OF THE WORLD IS AT HAND, GOD SAYS!! SEE ARTICLE ON PAGE 12-B.

New York Times: GOD VOWS DESTRUCTION OF THE EARTH!! WOMEN, CHILDREN AND MINORITIES TO BE HARDEST HIT!!

Every now and then you see evidence that this last punchline, isn’t really a joke. It’s reality. Well, this is one of those times.

If climate change predictions by researchers at the University of Toronto prove to be right, low-lying Bangladesh will suffer some of the worst effects of global warming. Already, about a fifth of the country is flooded annually. As temperatures and sea levels rise, flooding may increase up to 40 percent.

For Bangladeshi women, this is particularly bad news. In some past floods–such as in April 1991 following a Category 4 cyclone–the death rate for women was five times that of men.

Now, prostate cancer aside, when’s the last time you saw something being played up as a bad potential disaster because, if it should come to pass, men would be hardest hit?

You never see it. Doesn’t anyone ever stop to think why this is? Men aren’t exactly like cockroaches you know. We’re fragile; compared to women, in a lot of ways we’re fragile. We’re top-heavy. We jump, with parachutes and bungee cords. The actuarial tables confirm that time has a more harmful affect on us than it does on our counterparts. We store fat in our “love handles” to live off it in the lean times; our ass cheeks, and thighs, don’t play much of a part of this process. In sum, we aren’t constructed to have someone else live inside our bodies, and in so doing be protected from harm. We’re beasts of burden. You might say the male of the species is built to fall apart.

So there must be a lot of calamities out there that will hit men the hardest. How come it is we never hear about them?

It’s marketing, that’s why. If I’m a woman, I see a news story that says “women hardest hit,” I want to buy that newspaper and learn as much as I can. I’m a guy, though, so if I see a paper in a newsstand that says “men hardest hit” I’m much more likely to leave the quarters in my pocket, and walk on. Why is that?

Well, first the obvious. Quarters are money. I’m a cheapass.

Also, I’m Superman. Nothing hurts me. You say something comes along that will hurt men; well, it’s hardly a given that it’s going to hurt me.

I don’t feel any special kinship with other men. Let’s say I’m going to meet some other guy, someone who is a complete stranger to me, someone I don’t know. What am I to assume about this guy? He could be a nice guy, but it’s equally likely he’s an asshole. Men understand this about other men. We spend half our waking lives driving on the roads with other men, flicking each other off. Women seem to labor under this universal premise that all other women are part of a special Virtual Union, and they are honor-bound to protect other womens’ interests.

So this is marketing, and we’re slow to realize it because to understand the effect of the marketing, you have to acknowledge that men and women are different and they’re built by design to behave differently. We don’t like to acknowledge that. And yet, there has to be a discrepancy somewhere, because as I discussed above nothing ever seems to deal a tougher blow to the men. It’s always the women.

Yeah, you know, we’re talking about water coming up and drowning people. Women hardest hit? Women are more bouyant. So what’re you talking about?

Frisch STWF’d

Thing I Know #54. Find me ten men who will argue with me about something, and I’ll show you one man who has something to tell me, and nine jackasses who are just showing off for someone else.

Okay, I’ll acknowledge it happened. University of Arizona Adjunct Psychology Instructor Deborah Frisch has resigned her position to Spend Time With The Family. Here at The Blog Nobody Reads, we call that getting STWF’d. And we continue to use that verb here, even though there’s no suggestion that this has anything to do with a family, and…a much more popular word is on the way to being developed…

When I�m done with you, Deb, you�re going to be an internet verb.

Thus sayeth Jeff Goldstein, proprietor of Protein Wisdom, to his antagonist Dr. Frisch. The thread from which this comment is peeled, is, to date, the best one-stop-shopping spot from which one can view the entire sorry spew of drivel from the good Professor. Clearly, with regard to TIK #54, above, Frisch is one of the nine jackasses.

I�d like to hear more about your �tyke� by the way. Girl? Boy? Toddler? Teen? Are you still married to the woman you ephed to give birth to the tyke?

Tell all, bro!

And

[…] as I said elsewhere, if I woke up tomorrow and learned that someone else had shot you and your �tyke� it wouldn�t slow me down one iota. You aren�t �human� to me.

[…]

So if you could just tell me the AGE and SEX of your �tyke,� I�d be stoked!

Thanx!

And

Ooh. Two year old boy. Sounds hot. You live in Colorado, I see. Hope no one Jon-Benets your baby.

Are you still married to the woman you humped to produce the toddler?

And

I reiterate: If some nutcase kidnapped your child tomorrow and did to her what was done to your fellow Coloradan, Jon-Benet Ramsey, I wouldn�t give a damn.

And

Give your pathetic progeny (I sure hope that mofo got good genes from his mama!) a big fat tongue-filled kiss from me! LOTS AND LOTS OF SALIVA from Auntie MOONBAT, if you don�t mind!

Somehow, Jeffy boy, I think you get off on the possibility of Frenching your pathetic progeny, even if it is a boy. You seem like a VERY, VERY sick mofo to me, bro.

And

You know, Jeff, I just don�t get it. You say, and I believe you, that a human female chose to procreate with you and you have produced a 2 year old progeny.

But you live in Colorado and I really can�t believe there are women desperate and/or stupid enough to procreate with the likes of you.

What am I missing, dude?

So the poor bitch is dirt poor and that�s why she pretended you were worthy of procreating with?

And

Just my two cents: The pathetic jeffy boy goldstein plays the jew card 24/7. Didn�t you notice?

THIS IS A CESSPOOL!!! GET OUT WHILE YOU CAN!!!!

JEFF!!! DRINK THE KOOLAID AND LET YOUR WIFE RAISE THE little Goldstein Junior!

And

I am SHAKING, I tell you, SHAKING!!! in my boots at the prosect at an FBI and/or state police trooper tromping down my driveway to see if I was a threat to the progeny of the pissant name of Jeff �pissant� Goldstein of the pathetic, neutered, sissified, state of Colorado. I don�t give a rat�s ass whether the pissant�s progeny live or die, but I have no intention of snuffing the mofo�s chillen myself.

And

Still waiting for some words of wisdom (NOT!) from you, Jeffy boy!

Your little boot-lickers have had their say. What say you, king dingbat?!

Wanna escalate this game. Fine wit me.

Bring it on, hombre.

Bring it on.

This is endemic within the left. I’m not referring to the nasty comments, or the unconstructive comments, or the posturing or the name-calling. I’m referring to the quantity. The density, on a per-hundred-words basis. It’s competitive.

Being the author of TIK #54, I have seen my share of this stuff flying my way. It’s not that I didn’t have it coming, or at least, didn’t provoke it. But the two-line spittle-flinging manifesto impresses me as something that is put together to head off criticism not from me, or from people inclined to agree with me, but from people inclined to agree with them. Like they’re anticipating someone will write in with something like this…

Dude,

I was contaminating my eyeballs with that chocolate streak of a blog House of Eratosthenes by that pukebrain “mkfreeberg” or whatever, and I saw how you put him in his place. Kudos, man. But the thing of it is, in that one-liner you got in, you insulted him fifteen times. He had at least sixteen coming. Anything less than that is unacceptable. Sorry pal, but I’m going to have to report you at next Thursday’s moonbat meeting. I hear they just bought a new paddle. Wear yer iron shorts.

Or, you know, some variation of the above. That seems to be the concern that takes a back seat to none other. Coherently communicating a thought…that’s a distant second.

That has become just a rote process.

Another rote process, is to act like a victim when there are consequences involved. Quoth Professor Frisch on the whole experience…

I have resigned from the University of Arizona so there is no need for other enraged people to write to administrators there. I am a temporary worker there and I am in Oregon for the summer.

Some blogs have posted comments that I perceive to be physically threatening. I have contacted the FBI and the Pajamas Media staff to determine how to proceed with this aspect of this unbelievable experience.

My intention in this post is to de-escalate the situation. The comments that started this all were nasty, not threatening. But I feel very threatened by the response.

Jeff – I lost my job. You won. Could you call off the troops?

UPDATE: I have been receiving emails alluding to the fact that I got fired. I was not fired. I resigned. I was not pressured to resign. I just sent my boss an email explaining what was happening and told him I thought it was best for all involved if I resigned.

Frisch goes on with a reference to people “posting snippets of what I posted that have been embellished with references to french kissing and other things I didn’t say.” This places the conversation within the realm of dipute…or it would, if Frisch would only be more specific about the “other things I didn’t say.” Rather convenient that she did not, since this has the effect of calling every word into dispute, without her actually disputing any of it.

Yeah…thanks, I’ll let everybody else make up their own mind, as usual, but for myself I’ll regard the snippets above as accurate. Just my opinion.

Former Professor Frisch, you are a very nasty woman when you want to be. Your judgment is poor. What were you thinking? Another thing…

“I was not fired. I resigned. I was not pressured to resign. I just sent my boss an email explaining what was happening and told him I thought it was best for all involved if I resigned.” This is a direct contradiction with “Jeff – I lost my job. You won.”

There is an effort underway to convince the public-at-large that something terribly unfair is being done to liberal moonbats in general, since this makes them look like a bunch of psychopaths. The ingredients in this Frisch Stew are quite nasty, but as I said above, none of them are isolated. The squeeze-as-many-insults-into-each-sentence-as-possible, the babbling incoherence, the inconsistent statements that bely a complete apathy toward what is true and what isn’t, the breakneck snap-around from “I’m big, I’m bad, bring it on” to “why you kicking a dead horse, leave me alone you already won you big bully.”

Why am I being commanded to believe, that these aren’t intrinsic attributes to left-wing diatribes? Or that if they are, then that the right-wing diatribes must be equally tainted? This has not been my personal experience.

Update: Hey, here’s a great example of what I’m talking about. The whole experience discussed above is bottom-lined by someone more inclined to agree with Dr. Frisch than with Goldstein or me. Now look at that post. Just look at it. Paragraph after paragraph after paragraph…lots of information about what you’re supposed to think. No raw data, none at all. My post leads with the raw data, and then I tell you my own thoughts and why I have them. (Other conservative commentators at least link to the raw data, or pieces of it.)

Pay attention when you read blogs, both lefty-loosie and tighty-rightie. You’ll start to pick up on this pattern. I’m not going to sit here and type in some codswallop to the effect that this is an absolute, since real life has very few of those. But the pattern does hold up pretty consistently.

Memo For File XIII

I like the way this guy writes.

So I piled into my SUV (an Escalade) and headed to the theater. It’s actually pretty far, but thanks to four wheel drive, I was able to take a short cut! Which was great because I couldn’t wait to settle myself in for what would be an incredibly enlightening and worthy cinematic experience! But like I always do when i sit in a theater with my arm around a complete stranger and my pants loosely buckled, my thoughts begin to wander. And they wandered toward a few “inconvenient truths” I had of my own about the movie, about Al Gore, and about all of you, my dear Huffpo brethren.

-the left refuses to believe that the biggest threat to mankind isn’t man’s destruction of the planet, but ideology-based envy-driven homicidal maniacs who kill their own people for selling ice and falafel on the street. Granted, I hate falafel (it’s fal-awful!), but that’s no reason to behead someone. Cut off a hand – I can live with that.

-the reason why the left cannot agree that terrorism and islamic fundamentalism are the real threat is because to do so would force them to agree with George Bush. This is a horrifying thought, since for them Bush is a far bigger enemy than the soulful types who fly planes into buildings. People who fly planes into buildings are simply misunderstood, and it’s America’s fault for not understanding them. This makes me feel sad! Being misunderstood is hurtful. I would fly a plane into a building too, if I wasn’t so scared of flying. And buildings.

Now granted, he’s showing some healthy skepticism about something which has already received a lot of healthy skepticism, namely, the idea that man’s rough treatment of the environment has shoved us right up to the brink of global damnation, and now that the human race is almost at the point of no-turning-back, the thing to do is to make a movie and then promote it on talk shows while chortling at lame jokes.

But healthy skepticism is a good thing. We need more of it. You know, healthy skepticism about something besides the tired ol’ George Bush War on Terror Oil Industry Saudi Arabian Halliburton Connection Gore Florida blah blah blah.

And I like the way this guy links to the guy above. Thought I should bookmark his blog. It’s got some interesting stuff that isn’t discussed elsewhere. And I like Delaware. So he’s headed to the sidebar.

Go Easy On Him

On the subject of Warren Buffet bequeathing his billions of dollars to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, for the express purpose of avoiding the death tax. Which Buffet favors, with a passion, by the way.

My comments to the liberal blogger who is headed to my sidebar, the CEO And Chief Bottle Washer of Reason Reigns. He has submitted a comment in our brief (so far) exchange. A comment fairly riddled with holes. His comment consists of more hole, than stuff in which to make a hole. Begging for a good smackdown, he is.

Here is a transcript of the original post, plus our comments.

Buffett’s Billions
US billionaires try to explain giveaway

At least some people “get it”.

This news as the estate tax is under attack by the neocons who portray it as theft. Buffett supports the estate tax for its role in emphasizing merit over inheritance as the means for advancing in American society:

Buffett said he wanted to avoid “dynastic inheritance,” where people born into wealthy families get unfair head starts over the less fortunate.

Buffett said his children control the other foundations to get the stock, but he will not leave them “huge amounts” for their personal use. He said his philosophy is “that a very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything but not enough to do nothing.”

If you believe in capitalism, you believe in the market rewarding innovation, creativity and hard work… Brats running around spending the millions their parents accrued while contributing next-to-nothing don’t fit that model.
——————

…that a very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything but not enough to do nothing.

I agree completely. If I’m fortunate enough to put together the kind of personal fortune Warren Buffet has, I’m going to leave enough of it for my kids that they can do anything but not enough that they can sit around doing nothing.

I fail, and not just a little bit, I fail entirely, to see what this has to do with the Government. What is their stake in this? Nobody has yet explained this to my satisfaction. Ever.

Posted by mkfreeberg | 7:12 AM
——————
Well, government is the agent that protects us and our freedoms.

Wealth represents power… wealth in and of itself is not a bad thing — but in our society wealth buys power.

I also believe in the free-market. Ideas, products, services, etc. are supposedly judged on their merit. Allowing corporations/people with VAST resources to squelch ideas is anti-free market. We’ve seen this behavior before: it was called the age of the Robber Barons. Such circumstances are the natural result of capitalism in an unregulated marketplace.

I believe government has a role in leveling the playing field � to get closer to the idea that “all men are created equal”. In our society the individual�s “financial birthplace” is about the biggest factor in determining success/failure. Your “class” correlates very closely with the level of education and success you have in life.

If government doesn�t regulate this — who will?

Posted by Reign of Reason | 8:54 AM

Okay, kiddies. Reign of Reason is wrong, but he isn’t just wrong and nothing more. He is wrong, like, six times, about six different things.

Half a dozen things. He got ’em wrong. They are big, glaring defects in logic, and I’ve got them stored on my Palm Pilot. I won’t upload them here, not yet. You take a stab at them first.

What did he get wrong? Enter comments below.

Why There Are No Libertarians In Congress

“Your taste is in your ass.”

The older I get, the less patience I have with women, especially with fickle women. And with the exception of the naive days of my extreme youth, when women dumped me far more often and I lapped up the abuse and begged for more, the above six words pretty much capture the extent of my parting words to those who found me tiresome. Maybe a seventh word: “Bye.” Maybe an extra five words of “have a nice life.”

The older I get, the more I know I’m worth having. I wear out my welcome with women who have limited attention spans. But who the hell needs ’em? These are not people who have actually accomplished much of anything…ever. So I don’t have a lot to say to women who demonstrate their extremely poor judgment, and taste in men, by stooping to the level of picking someone else over me. There’s very little to be said. And you know what? Ever since I picked up that attitude, the situation just doesn’t come up that often. Practically never. A man who knows what he’s worth, in spite of everything, is highly attractive to a woman. Intoxicating.

But I’m a flesh-and-blood guy. A real guy. Whereas, Hank Rearden, the antihero of Atlas Shrugged, a fictional character, once dumped by his extramarital sweetheart Dagny Taggart, tells her at the top of page 785 “Will you let me speak first? You see, it’s something I should have said to you long ago. Will you let me speak and not answer me until I finish?”

She nodded. Ooh…Dagny, sweetheart. Bad move. Bad, bad move.

Blah blah blah blah blah…this is microprint, now, five, perhaps six hundred words on each page. Blah blah blah…at the top of page 787, he manages to cram all this in, pregnant-woman style, no periods.

But if the body is evil, then so are those who provide the means of its survival, so is material wealth and those who produce it — and if moral values are set in contradiction to our physical existence, then it’s right that rewards should be unearned, that virtue should consist of the undone, that there should be no tie between achievement and profit, that the inferior animals who’re able to produce should serve those superior beings whose superiority in spirit consists of incompetence in the flesh.

Steel magnate Hank Rearden finally sputters to a stop at the bottom of page 788. That’s in the neighborhood of two thousand words. Two thousand words for some strumpet who’s decide some other guy cleans her pipes better than poor Henry.

This is about the time a decent friend would lean in and say “Hank old buddy, I think I got an idea why you might have lost your luster in her eyes, it’s got something to do with something called brevity.” But that is not to be. John Galt, Ayn Rand’s vision of the perfect man, the dude whose baby-batter is trickling down the inside of Dagny’s thighs while she’s listening to this endless epistle…is, himself, the author of a manifesto that begins on page 923 and doesn’t conclude until 979. Oh yes, I’m as serious as a heart attack. Page after page after page…that’s all John Galt speaking. On the radio. Telling everybody what’s what and what-for and where they all done wrong, and why they all suck so much. Thirty-thousand freakin’ words, plus some.

Still, I have to say, the book is a must-read. Does it have to be 1,069 pages? Honestly, I have to say no. Six hundred of those pages, easily, are nothing but therapy for the author, therapy she probably would not have needed if she had simply remained faithful to her husband. In fact, if you were to tell me someone managed to chisel it down to 300 pages…250…225…and kept the important aspects of the story intact, I would not be terribly surprised.

This is why there are no Libertarians in Congress. The building catches fire and you ask an Ayn Rand Objectivist-type to put it out, you get a 1,500-word thesis about how the Men of the Mind are the source of everything that is good, and the Moochers and the Looters are the source of everything bad, and maybe the fire should be allowed to burn, assuming it really does exist in the first place.

But what unbelievably good points there are in the novel. You’re missing something if you haven’t read it. Something you will not successfully pick up from anywhere else.

Attention Whore

The smarmy title of this post is intended as a reflection upon myself, not on the lovely Miss Cellania. Be that as it may, I was perusing her random thoughts and I came across the tweaked photorepresentation of Times Square you see to the left. Well, I just couldn’t leave that one alone. There’s something about going out of one’s way to be egotistical. I know I’m supposed to condemn such behavior, but at the same time, you have to sit back and admire it when there is creativity involved. It’s like…you know, kind of like watching your classmate put a tack on the teacher’s chair. Except relatively harmless compared to that. You have to give up the golf clap. You feel dirty, but you do.

And yet, admiration alone, didn’t seem like enough. This was a challenge, a challenge to be met. No…surpassed. So I looked around. What did I have, what did I have.

And then I found it.

A few minutes of toiling later, some simple math…and as the saying goes. Look at me! I’m an attention whore!

I’m also a plagiarist. What the hell, I only steal the good ideas.

The day after I made a good-faith attempt to capture what it means to be a liberal, along comes Sen. Joe Biden to show me up. My attempt yesterday was to just hit some of the high points, not to provide a complete encyclopedic coverage of the subject, but nevertheless the Senior Senator from Delaware shows me I left out something so important, that backtracking is compulsory. So backtrack I shall.

First just watch the video, those of you who have not already, I’ll wait right here. Dum de dum de dum…hmmm hmmm hmmm…

Back yet? Okay, two things, one already much-discussed, one not quite yet. Not to the best of my knowledge.

First the one that other people have already kicked around. Biden doesn’t need to answer to anybody here. He has nothing for which to atone, because he is a Democrat. If he were a Republican, we would have a scandal. And not just a little itty-bitty scandal, either. A full-blown one. The Republican scandal would change overnight what the 2006 election is all about, I daresay. Those darn Republicans, they think Indians aren’t fit to do anything except run Dunkin’ Donuts. No, that won’t be happening. Biden gets a pass. The idea is proposed through action, not words — since the idea doesn’t make enough sense to be articulated outright — that Democrats are drawing on a huge reserve of propaganda capital that they deposted clear back in the sixties with the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Liberties Act. So they get to make racist cracks without being overdrawn, whereas Republicans, well, they’re supposed to be still digging out of some kind of deficit.

Is that fair? Is that right? Does it serve the sensitivities and needs of the minorities who are supposed to be offended? No, no, and no. And yet, does anybody even question this situation anymore? No. Deep down, we all know the horrified breath-sucking about this racist slur, or that quasi-racist gaffe, is all about political weaponry, nothing more. When Democrats step in it, it doesn’t count. Right-wing talk-radio hosts and right-wing bloggers say it out loud…but everybody knows it.

Okay, that’s been covered.

Now on to what I’d like to notice. Did you see that look on his face as soon as the last syllable escaped his lips, that look of “oh golly, maybe I shouldn’t have said that?” Neither did I. He thought he was really doing something clever here. He thought he was really handing it to that Delaware East Indian community, congratulating them, above and beyond what was called for. Boy, they really owe him now. Biden stopped everything in his busy schedule, and made the effort to notice their accomplishments.

And if you’re wondering what accomplishment that is, just watch the video again. The accomplishment of being plentiful. That’s what I want to address. What human achievement means to a liberal. The achievement of becoming numerous. Like an Indian is put on earth to do nothing that some stupid fish couldn’t do.

Admit it, when is the last time you heard of a liberal Democrat congratulating someone on doing anything else? Someone whose last name isn’t Kennedy or Carter or Clinton. No, the rest of us are here to breed, and we’re to be congratulated when we take the group of which we are a part, and give that group a higher notch on some kind of demographic table. Unless that group is Republicans, of course.

Now this is outside of what I mentioned yesterday, but some parts of it do overlap with what I was saying. It goes back to living day-to-day just being free of concern about anything, versus, living day-to-day trying to get something done that isn’t quite done yet. We do not owe anything in our lives to those among our anscestors who managed to stay carefree about things; we don’t owe anything to those who went from cradle to grave without worrying. We really don’t owe anything to those who took their ethnic group, and overbred and overimmigrated until the quantity of that ethnic group was pegged in a chart somewhere.

We owe what we have, to people who had misgivings about the status quo, and labored until something dissatisfying to them was made satisfying. The video camera that captured Biden’s absent-minded racist drivel, was invented by someone like that. The “innernets” that carry it to you, likewise, was built by people like that. The video codec was developed by someone like that.

But our liberals don’t want anybody thinking the way those people thought, ever again. Just hunker down, go about your daily routine, and don’t worry about anything. Breed, bring your family over from your country of origin in much larger numbers, and vote for us. You East Indians who have made real contributions in engineering and medicine, we’ve got nothing to say to you.

Update 7/15/06: This is Installment 2 of 3. The first installment is here and the third installment is here.

Memo For File XII

I “did a Google” for the transcript of one of my favorite attack ads by Rush Limbaugh against the Democratic party. Stumbled across the website of this guy, who is reciting the transcript. He’s not giving credit…I dunno, maybe that’s not cool, but I’m not a Rush Limbaugh cop. I’m just glad to find it.

I’d really like to know why something more isn’t made of this. It seems a truism of life that if you hold yourself up as crusading for something, and you won’t say what that something is, you leave it up to other people to define it. Nature abhores a vacuum and all that. Well in the absence of Democrats coming out and telling us what they want done, we’re left having to figure it out for ourselves…and this hits home, at least, to me.

-I helped scare an old person.
-I stopped someone from keeping more of their money.
-So what if people want to have a say in the places they live and the cars that they drive?
-I gave money to an environmental group that helped keep us dependent on foreign oil.
-I help the enemies of democracy get stronger by telling them laws don�t matter.
-What if one day I need an abortion?
-Sex with an intern? Everybody does it.
-I help teach kids around America that America is always wrong.
The Democratic Party: Do you know what they stand for?

I’ve listened to my share of Rush satire PSA’s. I think this one takes the cake. Says stuff that needs to be said, consistent with the truth, leaves big gaping unanswered questions that leave people awake at night, or at least should.

The blogger linked above is worth linking and has some stuff that’s worth reading. He’s seeking to answer a question from an acquaintance of his, also out in Minnesota, who is also running a blog worth reading, I think.

That blogger, in turn, points us to a website chronicling incidents of Democrat meanness, and also to the blog of yet another ravishing sexy woman who is conservative. Also in Minnesota. The title of her blog suggests to me that I had made a mental note to add her before, and forgot.

Feelings First, Education Second IV

Thanks to my friends at Newsblog Central, word reaches us about this protest in our nationa’s capitol, although I guess it’s being discussed pretty much everywhere and I’m just Johnny-Come-Lately running behind the parade.

Those in favor of simplified spelling say children would learn faster and illiteracy rates would drop. Opponents say a new system would make spelling even more confusing.
:
It’s been 100 years since Andrew Carnegie helped create the Simplified Spelling Board to promote a retooling of written English and President Theodore Roosevelt tried to force the government to use simplified spelling in its publications. But advocates aren’t giving up.

They even picket the national spelling bee finals, held every year in Washington, costumed as bumble bees and hoisting signs that say “Enuf is enuf but enough is too much” or “I’m thru with through.”
:
“Great changes have been made in the past. Systems can change,” a hopeful [American Literacy Council president Alan] Mole said.

Lurning English reqierz roet memory rather than lojic, he sed.

In languages with phonetically spelled words, like German or Spanish, children learn to spell in weeks instead of months or years as is sometimes the case with English, Mole said.

Yeah, yeah, America sucks, other countries are so great. This time, the issue is that other languages are easier to learn because there’s more logic to how the words are spelled.

I hope everyone who’s pushing for this, understands all of their bedfellows…all of them.

There is a reason why English is the way it is. For one thing, it isn’t “English.” It’s got some German in it. It’s got some French in it. It’s got Latin and Greek, and then it’s got traces of Spanish and Italian. It’s a mongrel, and it’s a mongrel mostly because of America. The Melting Pot. You come over here, you learn English, and then you live out your life…and as you do so, neither you, nor the English language itself, remain untouched.

Alan Mole says the English language is illogical. What he can’t see or refuses to see, is that the language is illogical the way a highly-refined, often-used tool is illogical, to an apprentice who has not yet been schooled on the tool’s more arcane features.

I don’t mean to say Alan Mole is illiterate. He could be a very well-educated guy with a huge vocabulary. But if that is the case, then what I mean to say is he has not yet thought his argument all the way through, or if he has, he seeks to deceive.

The English Language lacks this highly-prized but dubiously-valuable attribute of “consistency,” which is a luxury to be afforded to languages constructed in vacuums. The English Language is sophisticated; throughout the centuries, it has had to do some work. It has simple phonetic sounds represented with complicated juxtapositions of written vowels, like, three vowels in a row, where we borrowed things from the French. It has long sequences of syllables, five syllables in a single word, no syllable more than two or three letters long, where we borrowed things from the Greek.

You wanted diversity, you got it. Now, it seems, a movement is afoot to prepare the English language for an era in which immigrants do not assimilate. They immigrate, and expect to find things in the new country, the way they want to find it. That isn’t how my grandparents immigrated.

Another curious bedfellow: Underachievement. I have a son who is going through the phase where every word not already understood, is a Question For Dad. Are my answers logical? Of course not. So I run into this all the time.

Therefore I must ask. When the English Language doesn’t make sense, what’s wrong with discussing the historical events that made things the way they are? Not only do things make sense when you’re done doing that, but the student has a leg-up on history. Why keep him dumbed down, thereby making a heavier burden for the history teacher as well as the English teacher?

Yet another curious bedfellow: This weird axiom, which seems to have popped up out of nowhere, that as we penetrate more deeply into the twenty-first century and our society becomes more sophisticated, things must therefore become necessarily more stupid. Or at least the people should be afforded the luxury of simpler thinking. Where, might I ask, did we ever get that?

Anybody got some parents, who, in their lifetimes, were able to get a little more rustic in their thinking than what their grandparents had to do?

This gets back to my response to the occasional commenter, who will send me an e-mail about my blog content saying something to the effect of “I don’t understand what opprobrious means.” My response is, since you’re reading it online, maybe you forgot but a dictionary is just a few keystrokes away.

And yet it never seems to be challenged, that in an age where we have more tools to expand our horizons and the tools are much easier to use, we should be given less occasion to have to use those tools or else something must be bollywonkers. Eh, sorry. It don’t work that way. It very seldom has.

Sidebar Update IV

Just updated the sidebar with several new additions. They are all worthy of mention, but I’ll just limit the commentary to the highlights.

Kender’s Musings, which is at the nexus of the previously mentioned Wide Awakes Radio (WAR) project.

NYC Educator, left-wing guy who has some interesting things to say from inside the public education system.

D. Challener Roe, which is the host of the 2996 Bloggers project, to which the blog you are reading now has committed.

Many more.

And some of the worthwhile folks about whom I have since learned, and/or forgot…

Susan Hill;

Webloggin;

Machete of Truth;

T. F. Boggs, Bored Soldier. This man is a hero. Go check his stuff first.

Update:
Modern Tribalist;

Swede and Czech;

Crush Liberalism;

Reason Reigns;

My Republican Blog;

Patriotic Mom.

There is a paradox at work here. Few people are talking about it, so I’ll just come out and say what I think everybody has come to realize, and try to answer the question I’m gathering everybody has.

Democrats should be kicking ass this year. Not just threatening to take over Congress, but winning in every contest in which they engage — with no compromise. They’re having an easy time selling the message of “maybe it’s time to think about putting someone else in charge”; they’re having a much tougher time selling the message of “that someone else is us.” It’s not having Democrats run things, that has people scared. It’s having Liberals run things. People are put off by the idea of seeing that happen. They’re even more put off by the idea of making it happen.

What is this liberalism all about? There is a central thesis to it, singular in nature, despite the pantheon of unrelated issues in our national debate. Part of the problem is, the central thesis has changed with the passage of time. And in the summer of 2006, it’s an ugly one that people don’t trust. Let’s look into it by exploring a plurality of issues, and the “liberal” resolutions to those issues.

Scenario 1 of 3: I run a shop. I need some help. A lot of help; as much as I can possibly get. Entry-level, no experience required, maybe manual labor. I have run the numbers and I can justify a total of $30 per hour, not counting money for the Social Security match, benefits, and miscellaneous employee-related expenses.

The minimum wage in California is $6.75 an hour. With the status quo left in place, I have the wherewithal to provide a livelihood to four recent high school graduates, looking for a way to enter the world of work. Whoops, though, In San Francisco the minimum wage is is $8.50.

Let’s say liberals want San Francisco’s minimum wage to become California’s minimum wage. Under the aegis of liberalism, the minimum wage must be constantly raised. Constantly. Sure, it has not been unusual to see liberals gathering some case studies of people on minimum wage who just can’t make it, and need more dough. But liberals don’t always rely on the case study to make their point. Since about halfway through President Clinton’s administration, it has become much more popular among liberals to say, heck with how people are doin’, the minimum wage must be raised because it has not been changed in X many years. So nevermind whether people are scraping by or not. Even if everything is peachy-keen from sea to shining sea, it’s got to keep on going up, as part of a ritual.

So $8.50 they want it to be, and $8.50 it shall be. There is no subsidy to tack on to my $30 an hour, because after all that would be “corporate welfare.” Liberals say you aren’t supposed to do that. So…eight-and-a-half goes into thirty three times, not four. One of my prospective employees must go back home, to circle more Help Wanted ads and yammer at Mom to bring some more grits to his bedroom door while watching Saturday morning cartoons.

Liberals have an answer for that, too. They “do studies,” and then come out and say things like “our study found no measurable negative impact on employment.”

So…the study says I do not need to send one of the four home to mother.

But $8.50 times four, is $4 more than I can spend, and $7 more than I have to spend with things left the way they are now. This is simple math. This is not an isolated situation; with issue after issue, liberalism upholds a disturbing pattern of insisting that I stop thinking for myself, even in matters of simple multiplication and subtraction, and outsource my thinking to other people.

People who do studies. People who promote studies. People who are not in the office with me, sweating over the figures with me, helping me to figure out how to pay the bills with the money I have. People who, so far as I know, have never transferred money from a personal savings account to meet a payroll. Those are the people telling me to forget about math, put the calculator down, it will all work out.

Scenario 2 of 3: Mohammed Atta al-Sayed, and eighteen other evil men, hijack planes and crash them into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. With 20/20 hindsight, our various intelligence services learn there is a complicated web of financial and political entanglements circumnavigating the globe, involving powerful and wretched men who kill jews and Americans so that they can send messages to each other. Our President, drawing on the patriotic fervor sweeping the country in the wake of the senseless tragedy that ended 2,996 innocent lives, comes up with a plan of action. It boils down to this: Drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan; enforce the Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998 signed by President Clinton requiring a change in the government of Iraq; and hunt down terrorists wherever else they may be like the dogs they are.

Phase II of this plan turns out to be vastly expensive, in human life, dollars and in political capital. It is also hobbled by the specter of bad intelligence. The administration tried to get the ineffectual United Nations to come on board, and remain consistent with the resolutions the U.N. itself had passed, and support this pillar. He cited Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) that Saddam Hussein’s regime was supposed to be pursuing, in violation of U.N. mandates to disarm. The U.N. in general, and France and Germany in particular, refused. We invaded Iraq anyway. We found WMD, but they were old. Deadly WMD. Old.

Now, then. What the liberal course-of-action is supposed to be with regard to this, has become extraordinarily difficult to figure out. The liberals themselves aren’t sure what it is. But we’re after a central thesis here, not a course-of-action, and while a course-of-action would be useful in figuring out the thesis, it is not required.

So let’s look at the ingredients the liberals want in their stew, and leave the stew itself for someone else to cook up. They want a withdrawal from Iraq, and/or a timetable for same. They want a legacy, a negative legacy, a consensus that doing anything at all with Iraq was a mistake and it should have been left alone. I am inferring, although I’m not completely sure about this, that they want a precedent in United States foreign policy that the next time we come across a troublesome psycho like Hussein, we may pontificate about the situation as much as we want but nothing should be translated into action. That seems to be a fairly solid conclusion.

The negative-legacy should include something about the epidemic of patriotism that swept the nation after the 9-11 attacks themselves, and translated into the actions we took. Somewhere in there, the liberals say in unison, there was a mistake. On where that mistake was, it appears they are divided. A big faction amongst them insists the patriotism itself was a mistake, and if there is a competing faction in their midst dissenting that notion, it has yet to find a voice. So patriotism is bad.

There is a lot of castigation for anyone who deigns to “question” their “patriotism,” though. Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks attacks the very notion of patriotism. We are allowed to repeat the bad things liberals say about patriotism; we are not allowed to notice them saying it.

There is a talking point floating around in liberal-land that you aren’t that likely to be personally injured in a terrorist attack anyway. So I guess if there’s a course of action to be undertaken, it is to simply forget about the issue altogether. The liberal plan here doesn’t seem to have quite so much to do with things to do, as with what to talk about.

Scenario 3 of 3: My health is starting to fail. I have been successful and accumulated a comfortable personal fortune, in the range of somewhere around $10 million. I want to divide my estate among my three children. If I live until 2011 when the death tax is reinstated (barring further action from Congress), my assets will be subject to this tax. The website deathtax.com says “After utilization of a $625,000 exemption, the rate of tax is 37% and once assets have reached the size of $3 million, the rate of tax is 55%.” My calculator says this is $4,867,500.00, due from my estate, in cash, within nine months of my demise. Roughly half of the estate.

Not, it should be said, half of the liquid assets; half of everything. In cash. Which means a conversion must take place. On a timeline. My children, or the executor of the estate, will be placed in the position of being “low-balled.” If there is some acreage, then in 270 days time that acreage must be converted into cash. Prospective buyers, who perhaps don’t care as much about the transaction as the executor does, can offer whatever they want, and if the offer isn’t taken they can walk.

If this supply-and-demand equation upsets the net worth of the estate, so that after my death the estate ends up being worth eight million dollars instead of ten, that’s the executor’s problem, not the government’s. The bill is what the bill is. Pay up.

Family farm? Sell it.

Nothing left over? Fine.

Assets lost that were previously generating revenue? That’s great. My kids didn’t need the income anyway. If they think they did, they’re just wrong.

Liberals have a very specific position about this: Congress should take no action, and allow the death tax to be reinstated. They say without a death tax, we’re bound to get a system of stagnating aristocracy going, my children will sit around drinking lemonade at the Country Club doing nothing. With the death tax, they’re pulled down to the level of the rest of us, and everybody benefits.

Oh and by the way, don’t call it a double-tax, even though in my lifetime I paid taxes on every nickel I ever earned. The tax is being paid by my children, since I’m dead and don’t care what happens to my money. My children are seeing the money for the very first time, therefore Uncle Sam is entitled to his cut.

Curiously, even though this is a “tax,” it is spectacularly rare that anybody argues in favor of the tax on the strength of the need for the revenues to be raised. Amongst the advocates of restoring the death tax, it’s all about depletion. It’s all about making sure certain people are hurt appropriately.

Okay, what is the central thesis behind each of these scenarios?

There is a pattern of anti-intellectualism, even where personal success depends on personal thinking. Where am I going to get the money to hire these people, what are the terrorists going to do to us if we don’t do something about them, what will become of my heirs and my property after my demise. There’s a pattern of Hakuna Matata, “don’t worry be happy.” Liberals want us to be happy and content, living our day-to-day lives free of pressing concern — but not as dignified people. More like…ants. Ants do what The Queen tells them to do, toiling away, free of any concern about sadistic kids with hiking boots and magnifying glasses, since after all they can’t really do anything about it. They live, they die, and after they’re dead life goes on. They build hills, but not for themselves, instead it’s all for the hive.

It is nihilism, Definition 1-b: “A doctrine holding that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated.”

Well, that isn’t quite true. Liberal ideas can be communicated, indeed must be communicated. When this takes place, however, I notice that the communication doesn’t involve an awful lot. More often than not, that which is communicated is a negative. I have a non-liberal thought, and the liberal communication to me is a mental rap-across-the-knuckles, and derivatives of same — not much else.

Thou shalt not do math before adding people to thine payroll. Thou shalt not think about terrorists. Thou shalt not aspire to possess more money than we think thou shouldst have.

And this goes on down the line. Global warming: Stop thinking, trust the experts, do what you can to conserve — and what is conserve? Consume less, which means, do less living.

Education: Don’t take your child out of the failing school system, keep him in there. Stop asking how well the district is doing, or whether your child is receiving a quality education. Hakuna Matada. If you act, you may injure the collective. Think about the district the way the ant thinks about the hill.

How we’re seen around the world: Start apologizing. Worry less about the opinion of other Americans, and more about the opinion around the world — as it’s interpreted, more often than not, by other Americans. Be less “boisterous.” Be more “humble.”

God: Separation of church and state, which is not in the Constitution, is everything. Free exercise, which really is in the Constitution, doesn’t matter at all. In any arena that may be connected to public-sector administration, even tangentially, no religion may be mentioned — save for that religion embracing the article of faith that there is no God. That’s the new state-sanctioned religion. And oh by the way, if you’re thinking of actually calling it that, don’t.

Guns: Get rid of them. Think you need them for your personal protection? Don’t think about it. Living out in the sticks? Wife pregnant? “911” has a thirty-minute response time? Hakuna Matada. Our “studies” say you don’t need the piece. Ditch it.

It’s all got to do with things mattering less. Less thinking going on. People shutting up and doing what they’re told. What they’re told by…oh, what does it matter who. Stop asking questions.

Hakuna Matada.

This is a tragedy. Liberalism, as I pointed out in my FAQ (Questions #5 and 6), is supposed to be about thinking for yourself, freely. It has meant exactly that. It has swiveled around 180 degrees. It has done this in my lifetime, and I’m not that old.

No wonder people are having a tough time actually voting for it, now, when it should be easier to do so than it has been since the days of Camelot.

Votes, for better or for worse, are supposed to be cast by individuals. Thinking individuals. And liberalism is no longer on their side.

Thing I Know #113. A crisis precedes logical thinking. Logical thinking precedes a solution to the crisis. Too long a time without a crisis, precedes indulgence and sloppy thinking. Indulgence and sloppy thinking precede the next crisis.

Update 7/15/06: This is Installment 1 of 3. The second installment is here and the third installment is here.

My MSM Drinking Game

You’ve been hearing for years and years now about the “MSM,” or “Mainstream Media.” Our liberals, feeling wounded whenever anybody notices things they don’t want people noticing, can be counted on to do what they always do when they feel wounded by people noticing things: Use satire to coerce people into not noticing anymore.

Well, I think I’ve just come up with a better idea. I was inspired by this article about the “epidemic” of — get this — waving an American flag, and feeling good about being an American. Michelle Malkin has a good write-up about this.

What is my idea? I call it the “MSM Drinking Game.”

You know about drinking games, don’t you? Sure you do. Example: A “Star Wars Drinking Game” will instruct you to take a drink whenever someone yells “NOOOOOOO!,” or whenever the robot C-3PO is taken apart, or when Yoda talks about the Dark Side of the Force. A Friday the Thirteenth Drinking Game will say you’ve got to take a drink when someone says “Is that you?” or “It’s not funny anymore!,” or when two teenagers are slaughtered at the same time right after they’ve had sex, or when someone with huge breasts walks backwards. And of course a Star Trek Drinking Game would have to include the guy in the red shirt being killed; a Six Million Dollar Man Drinking Game would have to include jumping over walls with the nga-nga-nga-nga-nga-nga sound in the background.

The idea is that by simply knocking back a shot whenever the named event happens, you can get rip-roaring drunk. Since it’s only a finite number of events being listed, this demonstrates a pattern of cyclical material in a forum that’s supposed to be a bit more original — which may actually be quite charming. Or not.

I actually made use of this a couple weeks ago with my all-encompassing list of James Bond movie events.

Mainstream Media Drinking Game works as follows: Take a drink when…

Now, our MSM has established itself over the last century as a distinguished bastion against cookie-cutter thinking, a vanguard of critical, independent, cool-headed forensic inspection of current events.

And I have listed only eight items. No more than that. So I’m sure if you play my MSM Drinking Game while reading the news on the “innernets,” or from the plain ol’ newspaper like the one your grandpa used to read, or watching the six o’clock news, by the time you’re done you’ll still be able to recite the alphabet backwards while tying your shoes.

Suuuuuuurrrreee you will. Just try it. I dares ya.

Whiskey…Tango…Foxtrot…

What in tarnation is a “rolling fast”? Sounds like something that has to do with a car, a driver who forgot to set the brakes, and a hill. Well, maybe if we read the substance of it things will start to make more sense.

Anti-war activists from across the United States kicked off their Independence Day by beginning a “rolling fast” in protest against the war in Iraq.

The fast, organized by women’s anti-war group CodePink, is said to be fasting in 24 hour spurts from July 4th to International Peace Day on September 21st. Approximately 2,700 people will be involved, including politically outspoken Academy Award-winning actors Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon and, reportedly, country crooner Willie Nelson and ‘Lethal Weapon’ star Danny Glover.

Non-Hollywood celebrities include Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq. “This war is a crime,” Sheehan said outside the White House, where she began the fast with some 150 other protesters. “We represent millions of Americans who withdraw their support from this government.”

Yeah, “fasting in 24 hour spurts.” You don’t eat anything for 24 hours, then you grab some grub after handing the fast off to someone else. So, those of us who support the idea of actually doing something about it, when a butcher like Saddam Hussein is running around wild and free, making trouble for trouble’s sake alone anytime he feels like it…we’ll be lying wide awake at night, thinking about various Hollywood actors going without sushi and leek soup for a whole twenty-four hours at a time.

Guys half my age who are actually going through a “fast” of their own, sticking around ten thousand miles away from the only home they’ve ever known, not budging until the mission is complete…foot fungus, sand spiders, IED’s, sand as fine as baby powder, maybe jamming the rifle at exactly the wrong time, missing their baby’s first steps…yeah, those aren’t supposed to bother me one bit by comparison. Yeah, I’ll just ignore the 24-year-old sergeant who lost his leg, got a prosthetic, could very well stay home, but wants to go back with his remaining three limbs. Don’t bother me with that, I’m all a-twitter with guilt over Sean Penn waiting for the sun to come up before he can have any more caviar.

Uh…yeah, that made it make more sense. Sure it did.

I hope this gets more publicity. You don’t even have to mock this one, like I did above, to show what’s gunnybags & bollywonkers about it. Just tell the tale. Maybe a little more emphasis on the Hollywood halfwits being able to hand off the fast after 24 hours, than most of the media outlets give this nugget — I’ve noticed today they like to bury it down in the second-paragraph-from-the-end. Nice try.

Thing I Know #52. When angry people make demands, the ensuing fulfillment never seems to bring a stop to their anger.
Thing I Know #62. Throughout history, very little of note has been accomplished by people who made a paramount of concern out of what others thought.
Thing I Know #70. Courage has very little to do with being outspoken.

Memo For File XI

There is an urban legend that Champagne was invented by mistake, much like the glue in Post-It Notes.

I just did something like that. I was looking for a scene from Mary Tyler Moore (1970), the episode where Ted Baxter’s kid is pulling down poor grades in school. Ted and wife are in the cafeteria or breakroom of…something. I don’t remember what. They’re discussing what, in the educational process, could possibly be broken. An old man comes over, and I remember this old man was played by some distinguished character actor, can’t remember who. He says “excuse me, I couldn’t help overhearing the problem you’re having with your son’s school performance. And I just wanted you to know, these situations aren’t at all uncommon. They happen all the time. And sometimes the cause is very simple. And it’s amazing. Nobody ever thinks of it!”

Ted says “Oh, yeah? Like what?”

The old man says, “the kid could be stupid!”

And my parents got the biggest gut-chuckle out of this, even when seeing it on a re-run. It really hit home for them.

Hmmm…

Well anyway, I was doing a Google trying to track down information about this episode. This is a lot harder than you might think. I did find the website of this guy who calls himself “NYC Educator.” He makes reference to the scene here.

Kind of interesting. Disagrees with me about the New York Times thingy. He’s got a lot of lefty-loosey blogs in his blogroll, liberal halfwits like Huffington Post and Atrios. But he shows a capacity for coming up with his own ideas, and he seems to appreciate that something is busted and needs attention. The content of his website is strewn with righty-tighty ideas, like, when the kids/parents are just-plain-not-trying, maybe someone should recognize that…and that the right thing to do with a bad teacher, is to get that teacher fired.

He seems to think he’s for unions. I suspsect there’s much more to be reconciled between their vision and his, than he thinks. In the final analysis, I think he’s worth watching, because I like to get information from the inside of the educational system on what’s not quite working.

Meanwhile, the identity of the old man continues to elude me. Some things are amazingly profound through their amazing simplicity. What the old man said, is one of them. I’ll keep looking…

Godspeed to WAR

Wide-Awakes Radio (WAR), brainchild of Kender McGowan at Kender’s Musings, has a launch date of…today. An impressive crew of opinionated bloggers has been cobbled together, including friends Misha at Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, Jay at Stop the ACLU, and others.

Hope you had a great day at the office, lads. Looks like you had more umpshun than would fit in your gumpshun. Glad to see the interest is there. May it grow.

Imitation is the Sincerest Form XI

At the beginning of June I posted a windy essay that included a lengthy encapsulation of selected…um…bull squeeze that purports to capture the spirit of how America is “seen” around the world. I used the phrase “we are seen” to cast my net over this stuff, observed how unexectedly well that simple phraseology worked for this purpose, and noticed there were somewhere in the neighborhood of a million hits on this codswallop. Then, I carved out a generous slice of data space from the “innernets” to reinterate just a tiny sliver of what I had found, and made the following commentary about the abundance, the consistency, and the content:

There is a point to all this, and it isn’t a pretty one. When you say something is “seen” a certain way, you may pack a powerful punch in intimidating people toward your point-of-view, but you prove very little. What you’re really saying is that someone, somewhere, whether you name them or not, has a certain opinion. And this says, precisely, nothing.
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Give me an opinion, no matter how nonsensical you make it out to be, someone, somewhere, has that opinion. To point out simply that someone has it, therefore, is tantamount to saying nothing at all. Not that someone isn’t willing to waste time and breath pointing it out anyway. I have an impressive collection up there of “we are seen” quotes. It is just scratching the surface, believe me.

We here at The Blog That Nobody Reads are pleased to have made the acquaintance of Good Lieutenant who maintains Mein Blogovault you see off in the sidebar, and it would appear he first learned about us from that post.

Now, I don’t know if Christopher Hitchens reads my blog. I would suspect hardly anybody does. But how else do you explain this gem which appeared this morning in The Examiner? It would appear that what has been getting under my skin, has been doubly irritating to Mr. Hitchens…

Here�s what I want to know, and here�s why I want to know it. At what point in history, exactly, did the Pew Center decide that it knew how to measure world opinion?

I ask this because almost every week I seem to read a study of how the rest of the globe thinks (or at any rate feels) about the United States. The polls in this country are unreliable enough and are often used to measure intangibles, such as “approval ratings,” which is why there is so much fluctuation within and between them. But who�s doing the random samples in Somalia and Tajikistan and Ecuador?

I ask because these polls tend to inform Americans that the rest of the world has a decidedly low view of them. That this is true in large parts of the Middle East, and among large swathes of European intellectuals, is something that I can already tell you from experience.

I’ve been robbed, but I’m not calling the police. I’m quite flattered.

As an afterthought, I would add that if you were to ask me the worldwide approval rating of, let us say, Chad…or Monaco…or Paraguay…or Mongolia, or Indonesia, or Somalia, or Belgium…I would not know. I, furthermore, would not have the slightest clue where you could find out such a thing, nor would I have any idea where & how you could stay abreast of such a statistic on an ongoing basis. Furthermore, if you were to sound off on some grievance you have against any one of the above countries, I’m completely ignorant on where you could go to air it, to be put in touch with others who have similar grievances. And I certainly don’t know how you can get your disaffected opinion into print, in the form of a poll result.

The United States is spay-shul, in that regard. I guess. Not sure who decides these things.

Welcome to our birthday party. You’d better bring a present, if you want a slice of the cake.

Must-Tards VIII

Via BSAlert.com, we learn about a church in Memphis, TN that has used $2.5 million to build a Statue of Liberty to be unveiled today. But you see, this one is special.

The Statue of Liberation looks a lot like the Statue of Liberty, but the famous torch is replaced by a cross. Instead of the inscription about giving the lady the tired and poor, there are Roman numerals for the Ten Commandments.

Some people in the community are eager for the $2.5 million statue’s unveiling.

11-year-old Evelyn Douglass isn’t one of them. She says the Statue of Liberty represents the United States and the cross represents a specific religion. In her words, “It’s not right that they are mixing the two.”

It appears the statue cost $260,000, not $2.5 million.

The Miss Douglass quoted in the article is in good company here. Very good company. A lot of Americans agree with her. Your FARK comments follow…

As you can see, Miss Douglass is pretty far from being a lone voice in the wilderness.

I’m sorry for that.

You see, on this proclamation that the $2.5 million or $260,000 could have been spent on other things, I am more-or-less in agreement. Where I disagree, is the idea that it is worth commenting-upon. Not right that they are mixing the two…not right in what way? Were these taxpayer funds? Nobody, anywhere, seems to be saying so.

Not right…okay, so what if we were to knock this statue down, and I were to make, say, a ten-inch replica of it, with the cross and the Commandments, and put it in my living room. Would that be “not right”?

What is scarier to American freedom, might I ask. The statue itself, or a suggestion that someone in authority should be able to come along, waggle a finger, and with a tut-tut and a cluck-cluck, haul the statue away with instructions to put up a different image less offensive to those-in-the-know?

The statue is the church’s business. It starts out being that, but is being made, with a lot of tsk-tsking, into everybody else’s. Hm, you know, that’s not the America I know. In the America I know, people put up statues and signs, and the statues and signs remain the business of the person putting ’em up…not everybody else’s. There are lots of countries you can go to, where everything everybody does is everybody else’s business. Not here.

I put up a statue saying America is all about Christianity…or that it’s all about nightclubbing…or that it’s all about Hooters…or that it’s all about Coco Puffs and Saturday morning cartoons. It’s all the same. It’s free speech.

If one of those examples is to be lifted upward in to a special eschelon of Offensive Stuff That Must Be Hauled Away, because someone likes to believe in a religion of There-Is-No-Gawd and my statue gets in the way of that…you know what? That, right there, is a violation of the First Amendment. “…or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” It’s in there. Look it up.

Except, this transgression of free speech is scarier than all the others…we happen to be closest to enshrining that one into law.

Neal’s Challenge

Neal Boortz, not one known for frequent updates to his website during holidays, has seen fit to update his page today. And what an interesting commentary he has for us.

Now, in 2006, Americans are far more dependent on and oppressed by the Imperial Federal Government of the United States than they ever were by Great Britain. The level of taxation is higher, and the level of government interference in our daily life exceeds anything the colonists ever saw. In spite of all this, Americans will be waving flags, watching parades, going on picnics, and gawking at fireworks today, all in celebration of their love of freedom.

Love of freedom, my left big toe. This isn’t a celebration of freedom, this is a celebration of hypocrites.

So .. you love freedom, do you? You’re out there waving your flag and watching fireworks with the rest of the freedom lovers? Do you mind very much taking the time off to handle a little quiz? Just go through the following scenarios and answer a few questions:

The questions are pretty predictable. They have to do (see my post from yesterday) with living life like a man, or living life like cattle. The colonists took the time to put together the Declaration of Independence, the birthday of which we celebrate today, to enumerate the reasons why they were taking the trouble to Dissolve The Bands That Connected.

It was a treasonous act. The Crown required absolute fidelity.

But they had to do it, because The Crown was treating them like a bunch of stupid cattle. Beasts of burden. You buy, you sell, you build, you ship…have the money change hands in whatever way you like, and when you’re done don’t forget to send the tax money back to us. And when we pass some new taxes without your consent, we’ll be good enough to let you know.

The Founding Fathers thought that was cattle-like. It was unsatisfactory, beneath the station in life they had been designed to occupy when they were created as thinking, honorable men. So they declared Independence (poll rating: 33%), fast-forward 230 years and how we doin’?

Moo…moo…

Suffering is on a fast-track. Someone doesn’t have what they need…or what they want…and they don’t even have time to go boo-hoo. If they say “boo” they don’t even get to the “hoo” before a news truck is in the driveway. Let’s get realistic about it — it doesn’t matter what the problem is. They may be missing a kidney, through no fault of their own…they might. Or, they have no money for baby formula because the whole paycheck went to cigarettes and lottery tickets.

The process is broken. We’re supposed to be compassionate toward people who are facing dire emergencies and aren’t at fault for the position they have in facing them. But this has nothing to do with anything. The magnitude of the crisis is irrelevant. The culpability they have in their situation is irrelevant. These things matter to the fast-track process, the way kibbles-n-bits versus cat poo matter to a hungry dog. It’s all the same. Down it goes. Every morsel of human suffering, or unfulfilled human desire, is broadcast. After it is broadcast, it is discussed. After it is discussed, it is lobbied, and then through public policy it is accommodated, more often than not at taxpayer expense. Health problems. Kids who don’t pay attention. Abusive ex-husbands. Lung cancer from years of willingly smoking cigarettes. Inadequate retirement plans. Penises that don’t get erect when someone wants them to.

I’d guesstimate half of these crises, as they are presented to us, have to do with the taxpayer-funded remedies we have previously constructed, being somehow inadequate. Or maybe the budget of a state will be put in dire financial straits, and the governor will take action to change the criteria of qualification for educational assistance. On the front page it goes. Change in criteria; someone qualified up until yesterday, and no longer does. Suffering! Load up the camera truck, and head out.

Anyway. Now you know Neal’s beef. And you know mine. You are free to disagree, of course, but I think all reasonable minds would have to sign on to the idea that the original idea of Independence may have…slipped a little?

Let’s just think about it some today. In fact, with what remains of this week, make a point of getting ahold of the newspaper in your area, whatever newspaper that may be, and opening it to Page B-1. That tends to be your “Local Human Suffering” section, from one metropolitan area to the next, whatever it may be called. In honor of the Spirit of ’76, read this stuff, and try to read between the lines. Women are forced to split up with their husbands in order to qualify for AFDC benefits. Fathers who live with their own mothers, so they can be full-time college students while a half-dozen souls under the rooftop live day-to-day in poverty, no longer qualify for tuition assistance because their wives make too much money. Some homeless guy, with an abundance of social security benefits, has to eat at our local bread-and-soup line because he lacks the mental competence to make use of his entitlements, and the law allows no one to act in his proxy. Government agencies spend good money, advertising, trying to make sure everyone’s aware of the “emergency” benefits they offer, to head off the disaster of a qualifying applicant actually trying to make do on his own without drawing on the benefits. Can’t have that, you know.

Read between the lines.

And be concerned.

Happy Independence Day.

Of Nature And Nature’s God

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them. Boy, that Thomas Jefferson. He really had a knack for tossing in the ol’ throw-away words. He really knew how to season the main course of his essay by sprinkling in a bunch of adjectives and nouns, sounding oh-so-weighty, but completely devoid of purpose, laying sprigs of inedible parsley alongside the pork roast.

Whoopsie, though, no he didn’t.

Studying the writings of the red-headed Founding Father, in his days as a rising young legal savant, and as an elderly, impoverished former President, one is awestruck by the unbroken pattern of purpose behind each word. His writing is like a good movie script. Everything has a point. Every article, every verb, every syllable.

Entirely worthy, like the writing of few other men either living or dead, of dissection.

So let us dissect. It’s birthday #230, after all.

They…and from this, it is easily inferred, the big “We” as well…have a station in life, a station to which we are entitled by the laws of Nature and Nature’s God. The laws of Nature, alone, do not entitle us to this station, nor do the laws of Nature’s God. We are entitled by both of these. What on earth could that mean?

It would appear that as far as the word “Nature,” definitions #1 and #4 of Merriam-Webster’s are the focal points of what Jefferson means to say.

1. The material world and its phenomena.
4. A primitive state of existence, untouched and uninfluenced by civilization or artificiality: couldn’t tolerate city life anymore and went back to nature.

We are entitled to these stations because we have been made to be entitled to them, in the state untouched and uninfluenced by artificiality. King George III is denying us this station, because he is influencing our status with artificiality, denying us rights to which we would naturally be entitled.

History supports the thesis that this has to do with trade. As I’ve already commented in Thing I Know #24: “A dog can pick out a master and follow him; a lemming can detect a consensus and go along with it; a monkey is capable of showing compassion to the weak; but only a human can honor a pledge.” This is a sacred thing, made moreso by the fact that the honor of a pledge, is the keystone to any & all trade. But the paramount quality to the honoring of pledges, is that only humans can do it. We must be able to engage freely in the practice of doing so, because we can do so. The laws of Nature say that whatever we can do, we must be able to do.

The laws of Nature stay in place, even when they are offensive to others. I don’t like to see spiders suck the juices out of flies, or to see killer whales bite seals in half while the victim is still alive. And yet, such things will be. Nature can be pretty harsh.

In this highly compact nugget of obscure terminology, Jefferson manages to observe, and soundly address, the dictum that this is not an absolute. I may have biceps as big as your thighs, and I may be able to beat the crap out of you. According to the logic above, I should be able to do it. I’m bigger, and stronger, so it’s “natural.” And indeed, that is what King George, and Parliament, were doing — passing taxes against the colonies, because they were legally able to do so, because they were militarily able to do so.

This is where “Nature’s God” comes in. Jefferson was saying this was wrong…

…and yet he wasn’t saying simply that, and nothing more. If this was the foundation of the argument, you could use the same logic and go around saying this is wrong, that’s wrong, don’t do that…insinuating yourself in all things whether they were any of your business or not, whether you had authority to enforce your decrees or not, over the flimsy foundation of “well, that’s just wrong,” like some smelly European.

Note that in 1776, Great Britain was a protestant nation. The laws of England decreed that we are here because God put us here, and by the Grace of God King George was the high and mighty Prince of all the realm. The King, in those days, was almost like a protestant version of the Pope. He shared the power over his subjects with Parliament, which was said to “virtually” represent the colonies. That is to say, the colonies were thought to be represented in the Parliament that approved the Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townshend Act of 1767, although, factually, they were not.

So according to the Law of Nature’s God, within this tiny nibble-sized clause, Jefferson, by implication, posed the hypothetical. The Creator put us here, clearly, with the explicit intent that we should live our lives as thinking individuals, engaged in lawful trade through the honoring of pledges, and by His divine will, appoints a sovereign, who, acting on the will of The Lord, proceeds to treat the colonists like…dogs. Beasts of burden, who simply draw breath, eat food, do work, and send the profit of the work back to Mother Britain.

Makes no freakin’ sense. Jefferson was saying, if we are all children of God, let us all act like it. And in order to act like it, we need absolute, inalienable rights, rights from which we cannot be separated by any mortal man, no matter how offensive our exercise of those rights may be…

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

Look that last one back over: We hold these truths to be self-evident. Our modern liberals would strike this down in a heartbeat, according to their own twisted logic of “oh yeah, prove it!” Jefferson, here, is saying I cannot prove it and I will not deign to try. We hold them to be self-evident. You may disagree with these premises, but in so doing, you abjure yourself from the discourse involved in reading our document. You cease to be part of our intended audience.

And of course, if you accept these truths, thus remaining part of our intended audience…you must ultimately come to agree that the Independence of the colonies (poll rating: about seven percentage points, in 1776, beneath what President Bush has right now) is the right way — the only way — to go.

Man was not built to be two-legged cattle. He has rights, rights transgressed by the status quo. You can tell by looking at him.

You may peel a carrot, and in so doing comport with the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.

You may peel the skin off a living man, and in so doing comport with the Laws of Nature if you have this physical ability…but not with the laws of Nature’s God.

Man has rights. We may do everything that the laws of Nature say we can do, so long as we also comply with the laws of Nature’s God. And if we do so comply, then the laws of Nature’s God say that all other men must allow us to do what we are doing. If they use physical force to stop us, then they, in turn, are complying with the laws of Nature, but not with the laws of Nature’s God.

Nature’s God has a simple law: Now that you are here, do my work. Justify your existence. Use your lives to find some reasonable purpose to why I put you here in the first place.

And for an upper-crust of aristocracy to make arbitrary rules, while commoners toil away, doing nothing, just working for the benefit of others, sweeating, pooping, eating, drinking, like so many millions of bacteria, being denied the right and privilege to even think for themselves…that’s just not consistent with the mission. It cannot be. We are sovereigns as individuals — or else, we are a pointless experiment. And whoever makes us such a pointless experiment, thwarts the will of Almighty God. Thus, thwarting the point to his own existence, along with our own.

I believe in God, so I know what we’re celebrating tomorrow. I feel really sorry for the atheists. They have no home in this country, and most of them don’t even realize it. As a scientic theory soundly based on empirical fact, God most certainly does not exist and cannot ever exist. But as a hypothetical, posed for the purpose of defining our existence and the justifying the same, He most certainly can.

And among those who seek shelter beneath the rights afforded by the laws of Nature and Nature’s God, whether they call themselves “atheists” or not…in His station as this hypothetical, defining and justifying the existence within which those rights are to be enjoyed…He must. Logically, there’s no way around it. The rights do not exist, unless there is authority to say they are there, and all authority to say the rights are there, are derived from Him for they can be derived from nowhere else.

Happy Independence Day.

Wingman

There is this scene in the classic movie Rashomon (1950) in which the criminal and the nobleman engage in a swordfight. It’s a re-enactment that’s been done two or three times earlier in the movie, according to different testimony, and this latest one is really lame. Not Revenge of the Sith (2005) type stuff, not in the least. Both combatants spend a great deal more time posturing, anticipating, stumbling, quivering, yelping, and once or twice in the whole melee their weapons actually make contact with a rather pathetic “pinging” noise. Naturally, this causes them both to retreat, topspeed, backward, like craven hyenas, and then the comical circling/trembling exercise is renewed again.

Kind of funny. Kind of eerie. Anyone who has not actually seen a swordfight in person, including your humble author, quickly gathers the impression that perhaps this version mirrors reality most closely.

As the critics and apologists of the New York Times circle each other over this whole SWIFT dealy-doo, the ensuing conflict reminds me of that scene. Rhetorical questions bumptiously posed, which in turn seem to have only a nodding acquaintance, if any acquaintance at all, with the point that is supposed to be made by posing them. Relatively simple matters, made more complicated, not to flesh out obscure points that would otherwise pass by forgotten, but instead to deceive and distract.

Brutally Honest, which is already listed in the sidebar, came up with a couple more of the anti-war posters photoshopped from the World War II days to more directly address the New York Times’ speaking-truth-to-power, or seditious-indiscretion, depending on your point of view. The post went up a week ago. For this, the blogger earned the enmity of one of his commentators, who said the blogger was “crazy-ass,” “freakazoid,” and “sinking into fascist territory real fast.”

Unlike the Rashomon duelists, the Brutally blogger preserved his dignity by refusing to engage. I, of course, am not that dignified.

Now, some will assert, I expect, that there’s nothing wrong with what the commentator said. Others with a slightly more healthy fixture to the plane of reality, will recognize the commentator is arriving at whatever haphazard conclusions he wants to in order to advance an agenda, neglecting completely to show how these conclusions can be logically supported by anything that was said, or anything that actually happened — but then go on to assert this is an isolated case.

Well, it isn’t an isolated case. People, just like the Brutally blogger, articulate the entirely sensible notion — the entirely sustainable notion, might I add — that the Times made a publishing decision running heavy on the peril to our national security, and much more lightly on the value of the revealed information to the public-at-large. For this, and/or for photoshopping some posters, the people who advance this simple observation are called “right-wing nutjobs,” “freakazoids,” and “neo-cons.” The notion that too much information might get some people killed, is summarily pronounced to be delusive, extravagant, half-assed, crazy, and to be nothing more than a reverberation of a cock-and-bull talk-radio talking-point.

Even though, in times past, our government prosecuted people for doing the same thing. This is just a simple fact. If it’s okay to do, now, what decades ago was unanimously recognized as treasonous, something must have changed. Has the nature of war changed? Can it be that information is less valuable to our enemies…now that we’ve jettisoned the moorings of the industrial age, and ventured headlong into the information age? If that’s the case, how can this be?

That’s the question. And all I hear back, in response, is a lot of swooshing, with some occasional pinging.

One of the favorite talking-points from the left-wing…oh, did you not know? The Left are pretty fond of talking points too. Anyway. One of the blustery rhetorical questions, which perhaps seeks to make a point, but shows little evidence of a continued fastening with that point, is this. The Wall Street Journal did it too!

Gee, when little kids say he did it first! at least they seek shelter behind the skirts of time. “First.” Of getting physical I am guilty, but I didn’t throw the first punch. By implication, I’m using the excuse of self-defense.

The “WSJ did it too!” defense is several levels weaker than this, because it is single-strand. It sees vindication through dilution, alone. What The Times did, is equal to what The Journal did, so if you utter even a syllable against The Times you are morally bound to mirror your invective in the direction of The Journal as well, or else you are a hypocrite. Attacking the critics; accusing the accusers.

One of the cards in the bottom row of this quivering house, is the notion that the two situations are identical. Hah! If only they were. Forget about the house collapsing; doubt must be cast on whether it can be built in the first place.

The Journal, after the umptyfratz-th time the argument was raised, decided the time had come to address it soundly on Friday:

President Bush, among others, has since assailed the press for revealing the [terrorist financing] program, and the Times has responded by wrapping itself in the First Amendment, the public’s right to know and even The Wall Street Journal. We published a story on the same subject on the same day, and the Times has since claimed us as its ideological wingman. So allow us to explain what actually happened, putting this episode within the larger context of a newspaper’s obligations during wartime.
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According to Tony Fratto, Treasury’s Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, he first contacted the Times some two months ago. He had heard Times reporters were asking questions about the highly classified program involving Swift, an international banking consortium that has cooperated with the U.S. to follow the money making its way to the likes of al Qaeda or Hezbollah. Mr. Fratto went on to ask the Times not to publish such a story on grounds that it would damage this useful terror-tracking method.

Sometime later, Secretary John Snow invited Times Executive Editor Bill Keller to his Treasury office to deliver the same message. Later still, Mr. Fratto says, Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, the leaders of the 9/11 Commission, made the same request of Mr. Keller. Democratic Congressman John Murtha and Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte also urged the newspaper not to publish the story.

The Times decided to publish anyway, letting Mr. Fratto know about its decision [on or about 6/21]. The Times agreed to delay publishing by a day to give Mr. Fratto a chance to bring the appropriate Treasury official home from overseas. Based on his own discussions with Times reporters and editors, Mr. Fratto says he believed “they had about 80% of the story, but they had about 30% of it wrong.” So the Administration decided that, in the interest of telling a more complete and accurate story, they would declassify a series of talking points about the program. They discussed those with the Times the next day, June 22.

Around the same time, Treasury contacted Journal reporter Glenn Simpson to offer him the same declassified information. Mr. Simpson has been working the terror finance beat for some time, including asking questions about the operations of Swift, and it is a common practice in Washington for government officials to disclose a story that is going to become public anyway to more than one reporter. Our guess is that Treasury also felt Mr. Simpson would write a straighter story than the Times, which was pushing a violation-of-privacy angle; on our reading of the two June 23 stories, he did.

We recount all this because more than a few commentators have tried to link the Journal and Times at the hip. On the left, the motive is to help shield the Times from political criticism. On the right, the goal is to tar everyone in the “mainstream media.” But anyone who understands how publishing decisions are made knows that different newspapers make up their minds differently.

Some argue that the Journal should have still declined to run the antiterror story. However, at no point did Treasury officials tell us not to publish the information. And while Journal editors knew the Times was about to publish the story, Treasury officials did not tell our editors they had urged the Times not to publish. What Journal editors did know is that they had senior government officials providing news they didn’t mind seeing in print. If this was a “leak,” it was entirely authorized.

Would the Journal have published the story had we discovered it as the Times did, and had the Administration asked us not to? Speaking for the editorial columns, our answer is probably not. Mr. Keller’s argument that the terrorists surely knew about the Swift monitoring is his own leap of faith. The terror financiers might have known the U.S. could track money from the U.S., but they might not have known the U.S. could follow the money from, say, Saudi Arabia. The first thing an al Qaeda financier would have done when the story broke is check if his bank was part of Swift.

Did you catch that?

Tony Fratto, through his boss, through the President, has the job of declaring things classified in the interest of national security. That means, to those unacquainted, there are some things that can’t be publicly known — if they are so known, people might be put in danger. This job, ultimately, rests with Fratto’s boss’ boss. The President. Yeah, the guy who didn’t really win Florida and Ohio. Whatever. Get over it already.

So here comes Fratto, to say hey wait a minute, don’t run that. It will compromise our national security. And Keller, who has First Amendment protection, but has no obligation for figuring out what’s classified and what isn’t…zip, zero, nada…says screw you.

This is supposed to be a “publishing decision.”

Sure it is…in the sense that New York Times stock value could tick up a notch or two, if & when the story is run. That is one side of the decision.

The other side of the decision, is the national security, to say nothing of human life, placed at risk.

How is Keller responsible for this? You know what, forget about responsibility…how is he even in a position to make an assessment of the risk? Nobody, at least no one brought to my attention, seeks to demonstrate such a thing.

So in order to re-assert this as a “publishing decision,” you need to demonstrate no lives were placed at risk. And The Left seeks to do that with the silly rhetorical question…how?

Ah, but the answer is so simple, that the question, by being asked, betrays a voyage into fantasy-land, the length of such sojourn, day-trip, lifetime-voyage, somewhere in between, being anybody’s guess. Um, well…terrorism kills people? Terrorism…can sometimes be expensive, and needs financing? The root of terrorism is terrorist money? Kill a weed it’s back tomorrow, kill the root it’s gone for good?

Like, duh?

I wish this dialog resembled some of the other more genuinely confrontational swordplay in Rashomon. But it doesn’t. I’m being asked to believe we are getting a better government when the government is transparent, because that way it is accountable to the public-at-large. I wish, when I saw the behavior of the public-at-large, once the guts of the transparent government have been exposed for inspection…that the ensuing forensic deliberations gave me a little more confidence.

Posture, quiver, swoosh…ping! Swoosh.